28 Misc Laff: Charles Fort, Damon Knight, and the Fortean Stories
Updated: 22 hours ago
“Charles,” Gorgonius Pantera said, “you wrote some of the easiest-to-ignore works in all the history of disreputable literature. Did you really have anything to go on at all? You created a whole universe of your own, but did you use anything at all that was material in that creation?” “No, Gorgolanza, I didn’t create a universe, I discovered one. I named it the Fortean Universe when I found that it was unnamed. I don’t know why many persons didn’t discover it before I did. They just weren’t paying attention, I guess. A tall man could crack his head on it on an especially low-sky day. Yes, I discovered that the sky could be as high as twenty-seven miles and as low as seven feet, that the moon was about the size of an Iowa hay-barn... I pointed out that not only do large and small rocks fall out of the sky, but also spiders (sometimes in clusters of more than a million of them), frogs, toads, worms, snakes, fish... tar or tar-like substance by the ton, pieces of fresh meat weighing as much as three hundred pounds, pieces of ice weighing as much as eight hundred pounds, horse-saddles, pieces of sea-weed more than a hundred feet long, rusted chassis of automobiles of unknown manufacture, row-boats which fell to earth so slowly that they were not broken, sea-anchors weighing as much as nine tons.” — East of Laughter
“No, I don't believe that Damon Knight died last year. He had his picture in LOCUS magazine of March this year with some minor news that would indicate that he was still alive. And he hasn't appeared in the LOCUS Obituary section... On the other hand, there has always been some doubt about that man-sized beard, whether there is indeed a man or anything behind it. He might have been dead behind that beard for ten years and who would know the difference? But whatever his state, I believe it remains the same as it has been for the last twenty years or so.” Letter
I’ve written quite a few times on the blog about Lafferty’s games with Forteanism, and it occurred to me that I haven’t put it all together. So that is this post.
On the outside chance that you don’t know about the man, Charles Hoy Fort (1874–1932) was an American writer and eccentric. He spent his time searching newspapers and scientific journals for anomalous reports. Rains of animals, unknown animals, poltergeists, weird disappearances, strange objects in the sky, wild talents, coincidences, wheels of light under the water, mysterious fires, colored rain: it all fascinated him. He vacuumed this “research” into his books, collections of “damned facts” ranging from real puzzles to hoaxes and unreliable anecdotes. Beginning with The Book of the Damned (1919), he waged a one-man war over science’s rejected evidence, challenging both its epistemic authority and its capacity to classify the philosophical fullness of reality. His own explanations were often deliberately provisional, but if you read him with any care, you see that beneath his jokes is a philosophical conviction that reality forms a continuum that scientific divisions misrepresent.
For digging into him, one of the best starting points I’ve found is Damon Knight’s Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained (1970), the standard early biography.
Knight’s book might explain why Fort began to take on an increasingly important role in Lafferty’s seventies work. That cover screams limestone islands, Sandaliotis, and the floating island in "Flaming Arrow."
Then there is Jim Steinmeyer’s Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural (2008). This is the one to get for the real Fort. It is a fun biography, attentive to Fort’s development as a writer and his relationship with Theodore Dreiser. Finally, Joshua Blu Buhs’s Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers (2024) is a great recent book and the best starting point for his intellectual and cultural significance. It traces Forteanism through science fiction, artistic modernism, and conspiracy culture. In other words, it is more interested in Forteanism than in Fort.
With that said, here is a list of what I consider to be the Fortean canon in Lafferty. Some are at the dead center; others are corner cases with overlaps worth noting.
