Charles Fort

(August 6, 1874 – May 3, 1932)

A collector of anomalous data, Charles Hoy Fort was hugely influential on science fiction, particularly during the Astounding era. His 1931 book Lo! was serialized in eight installments in Astounding in 1934.

Eric Frank Russell used Fortean themes in a number of his novels and stories, notably Sinister Barrier. SF and mystery author Miriam Allen deFord was also a Fortean, and once did research for Fort. Damon Knight, another sf writer influenced by Fort, wrote a biography, Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained (1970).

Fortean concepts such as “steam-engine time” and “I think we’re property” remain important to the genre.

But Charles Fort never mentioned wombats.

See also:

• “Charles Fort and Astounding Science Fiction” by Andrew May.
• Think to New Worlds: the Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers by Joshua Blu Buhs, University of Chicago Press, 2024.
• Complete works.
• The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort.
• Entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
• Fortean Society.
• Frontier Society.
• Charles Fort: A Radical Corpuscle

From Fancyclopedia 2, ca. 1959

An iconoclastic individual whose delight was in the flaw of the horde, meaning clots like us who believed what we were taught in school about the world. Fort, boasting [!!] that he believed what he read in the papers, culled from them and the rubbish heaps of the sciences (especially astronomy) a considerable mass of reports on unexplained occurrences, such as the well-known mystery of the Marie Celeste. In arranging and commenting on them, he seemed to be maintaining, among other theories, that the Earth is visited and considered as property by superior beings (a notion Eric Frank Russell developed into his novel Sinister Barrier); that there is a power of matter-transmission which he calls teleportation being evidenced from time to time, as by showers of objects from within a room near its ceiling; and that the Earth is surrounded by a shell not far away, the planets and stars being eruptions on the shell similar to volcanoes. Forteanism is not necessarily these beliefs themselves, but the iconoclastically anti-orthodox attitude associated with them; the main idea being that modern science is a tissue of outworn saws, holes continually appearing in it and being patched up or glossed over by new explanations. (It has been suggested that Fort himself didn't believe the theories mentioned above, but advanced them as being no more ridiculous than the suggestions of science.) The Fortean Society, founded 1931, publish an OO, Doubt, devoted to reporting of Fortean incidents, and claim to seek the company of all who want a belly laugh at the powers that be; a number of fans are members. A strictly fannish organization with the same purpose, the Frontier Society, was founded by Donn Brazier in 1940 and died when the United States entered the war.

From Fancyclopedia 1, ca. 1944

Forteanism – The beliefs advanced by Charles Fort in his books, of which Lo! was published serially in Astounding. The main idea is that modern science is a tissue of outworn saws, holes continually appearing in it and being patched up or glossed over by new explanations. Fort compiled a great mass of unexplained occurrences, such as the well-known mystery of the Marie Celeste. In arranging and commenting on them, he seemed to be maintaining, among other theories, that the Earth is visited and considered as properly by superior beings (now called vitons); that there is a power of matter-transmission which he calls teleportation being evidenced from time to time, as by showers of objects from within a room near its ceiling; and that the Earth is surrounded by a shell not far away, the planets and stars being eruptions on the shell similar to volcanoes.

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Person

1874—1934

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