Damon Knight

Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained

marzaatLeave a comment

Since I mentioned this book recently, you get another Raw Feed from the past.

Raw Feed (2002): Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained, Damon Knight, 1970. 

A disappointing biography. 

To be sure, there are some interesting details about Fort’s early life, quotes from his sole novel, The Outcast Manufacturers, and some details about his later life. However, there is not much about his life from the publishing of his The Book of the Damned to his death in 1932, and Knight spends far too much time and space quoting from The Books of Charles Fort which might have been fine for a newcomer to Fort but was boring to me since I just read them all. 

He also spends too much time trying to prove the “Prophet” of the title and talks about UFOs, cycles affected by astronomical events (though he admits that some of Fort’s criticisms of astronomers in New Lands is embarrassing) and even the virtues of Velikovsky (probably more relevant in 1970). 

He also spends a fair amount of time talking about the history of Fortean magazines and societies (Fort refused to join the Fortean Society) up to the book’s publishing, and he also talks about some science fiction influenced by Fort (he admits his own famous story “To Serve Man” exemplifies Fort’s famous quote: “We are property”). That part was interesting but not relevant to a biography. I suppose part of the problem is that most writers live a life of the mind — particularly true of the library-haunting and antisocial Fort — and their external life is boring so you have to talk about their work. [Update: Fort and his wife were actually fairly social.]

The Fortean Influence on Science Fiction

marzaat3 Comments

You won’t be surprised I first heard about this book from a review in Fortean Times.

Review: The Fortean Influence on Science Fiction: Charles Fort and the Evolution of the Genre, Tanner F. Boyle, 2020.

The price for the Kindle edition — $27.99 – was ridiculous. (Evidently, McFarland and other academic publishers think there are no non-academics who want to read their books.)

I’ve known about Charles Fort and his relationship to science fiction for 40 years since encountering Brian Ash’s The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Robert Holdstock’s Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. I’ve read Charles Forts four famous books. I’ve read Damon Knight’s and Jim Steinmeyer’s biographies of Charles Fort. I sought out the blatantly Fortean science fiction novels: Eric Frank Russell’s Sinister Barrier and Dreadful Sanctuary and James Blish’s Jack of Eagles. I’ve long known about the Fortean influence on Arthur C. Clarke. I’ve subscribed to Fortean Times for decades.

Was Boyle going to tell me anything I didn’t know?

Yes.

Charles Fort was the father of what Boyle calls “maybe fiction” – all those “occult” and paranormal studies and personal accounts, all the hidden (and usually ancient) histories, and UFO abduction stories we’ve heard of, authors like Graham Hancock, Richard Shaver, and Whitley Streiber whose accounts we either believe, judge as innocent mistakes, or regard as works of insanity. These are tales we are asked to believe whether couched as academic works or autobiography.

Continue reading →

Little Fuzzy

marzaat2 Comments

Review: Little Fuzzy, H. Beam Piper, 1962.

And so we come, at last, to Piper’s by far most famous novel. He started it on March 18, 1958 according to John F. Carr in Typewriter Killer. Damon Knight recommended that Berkley publish it, but they didn’t. Bill McMorris, Putnam’s editor thought it was “too adult for the teenage market” and of no interest to the adult reader. It would be rejected by more than twelve publishers and rejected three times by Avon, the company that eventually published it.  He finished it in March 1959 after several false starts.

Janet Wood, editor at Avon, was enthusiastic about the book and envisioned a series and a movie and toys. (Piper did sell the movie rights, but, of course, nothing came of it.) The novel would finally be published in 1962.

John W. Campbell rejected it for serialization in Analog because its many characters made it confusing in his mind. Carr thinks the problem is that the novel’s has many viewpoint characters, and it’s hard to know, in some scenes, which is the viewpoint character. I’d add that Piper doesn’t always tag characters sufficiently in scenes with dialogue. Carr says Piper is much better in his later Space Viking about keeping characters straight, and I would agree. 

Piper did not consider this one of his better works. I agree and would place all the Fuzzy novels in the bottom tier, along with First Cycle, of Piper’s novels. 

However, a lot of authors have written sequels to it. John Scalzi is one, of course, but there’s also William Tuning, Ardath Mayhar, Wolfgang Dieher, and Carr himself (the last two published by Carr’s Pequod Press). William Barton’s dedication to his Acts of Conscience alludes to it. 

Continue reading →

Star-Begotten

marzaat4 Comments

Review: Star-Begotten: A Life Lived in Science Fiction, James Gunn, 2017.51CAqNyrFQL._SX348_BO1,204,203,200_

Even James Gunn didn’t live all his life in science fiction, and the parts of his autobiography about his life outside that world are as entertaining and lengthy as the rest.

Of course, Gunn is a noted science fiction writer who first published in 1949 and has had new work published in 2018. He was the first to treat science fiction as an academic subject. He taught the craft of writing it for many years. He also was the man behind the Science Fiction Lecture Film series which filmed presentations of noted science fiction writers. You can find clips on YouTube and purchase the series from the Center for the Study of Science Fiction including one of Gunn interviewing Rod Serling.

But this autobiography gives you a sense of the man and something of his times.

It was a life, he acknowledges, governed by chance. One was meeting the woman he was married to for 65 years, Jane Anderson. It might not have happened if he hadn’t left college after his junior year in 1943 when we was finally called up for the Navy Air Force which he volunteered for shortly after World War Two started. Another chance event altered the trajectory of that Navy career when an unusually calm day, a condition in which Cadet Gunn was unused to, caused him fail to slow a plane while landing it solo for the first time. He became a washed-out aviator trainee. Continue reading →

Saving the World Through Science Fiction

marzaat3 Comments

Review: Saving the World Through Science Fiction: James Gunn, Writer, Teacher and Scholar, Michael R. Page, 2017.51jIRlPDtwL

Before I move on to the inevitable quibbles, let me say that anyone who is a James Gunn fan should buy this book. People who are curious about Gunn and his work should buy this.

Actually, since it’s the first and only book about Gunn, there’s not a lot of choice in the matter anyway.

I’ve long thought, even before starting this blog, that Gunn was an author unjustly neglected and that I should write a series on him. However, while I’ve done some posts on Gunn and read all his novels and most of his shorter works, I didn’t make notes on a lot of them. I’d have to do a lot of rereading and make careful notes.

Page has largely saved me the trouble. He says many of the things I noticed about Gunn. He also says many things I didn’t notice. Continue reading →

Gift From the Stars

marzaat6 Comments

Last summer, while I was waiting to get my hands on James Gunn’s latest novel, Transformation, I decided to fill in one of my few gaps in reading his fiction, so I took this one off the shelf.

It turns out it has some unexpected similarities to Gunn’s Transcendental trilogy and interesting on its own.

Review: Gift From the Stars, James Gunn, 2005.Gift from the Stars

As explained in Gunn’s preface as well as the introduction by Gregory Benford, this novel is part of a feedback loop with SETI research as well as Carl Sagan’s Contact.

Sagan was a great admirer of Gunn’s The Listeners, a set of novelletes turned into a novel which depicts the decades long quest for a signal from an alien intelligence and the effects of receiving one on humanity. Gunn took his ideas from SETI researcher Frank Drake as well as Sagan, and Benford says Gunn’s novel, in turn, influenced the paradigms of SETI efforts.

Sagan’s Contact was a response to Gunn’s novel, and Gunn started this novel, another one of his characteristic fix-ups of several shorter works, in response to the movie adaptation of Sagan’s novel. Specifically, Gunn didn’t find the end alien message or its purpose credible.

The result is an upping of scale from section to section. Benford says it puts him in mind of A. E. van Vogt’s famous method of writing 800 word scenes and then introducing a new wrinkle into the narrative. While that led, according to Benford, “gathering incoherence” in van Vogt, it leads to “expanding vistas” in this novel. Continue reading →

Year’s Best SF 2

marzaat1 Comment

The alternate history series continues with some qualifying stories buried in this review.

Raw Feed (2001): Year’s Best SF 2, ed. David G. Hartwell, 1997.years-best-sf-2

“After a Lean Winter”, Dave Wolverton — This is the second time I’ve read this story, the first being in its original appearance in the War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches, ed. by Kevin Anderson. I still liked its story of Jack London, during the Martian invasion depicted in H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, hiding out in the Arctic and watching a bloodmatch between dogs and a captured Martian. This time, though, (after reading Michael Swanwick’s “The Wisdom of Old Earth”, seemingly inspired by London’s The Sea Wolf), I was reminded that this is not only a clever use of London in the context of the central idea of alien invasion but also a further reworking of his theme of blood struggle in life and evolution.

“In the Upper Room“, Terry Bisson — I originally read this story in its first publication in Playboy. I didn’t like it then, and I didn’t like it the second time around. It was not interesting. It wasn’t an insightful story about lingerie fetish or any other type of sexual fetish. It wasn’t erotic. It wasn’t satirical — at least not in any way that mattered.

“Thinkertoy“, John Brunner — It was a nice surprise to see one of John Brunner’s last stories here. It was written for the Jack Williamson tribute anthology The Williamson Effect. According to his introductory notes, Hartwell says Brunner died before he could write the afterword for the story, but Hartwell speculates that it was inspired by Williamson’s “Jamboree”, a story I have not read. That may be true, but I also was reminded of Williamson’s classic “With Folded Hands” since, like that story, we have a man coming across a vendor of wonderful robotic merchandise, robots which eventually turn out to be very sinister. Here a widower buys the remarkable Tinkertoys which are clever, highly adaptable robots which can (rather like Legos) be assembled into several different shapes and do all sorts of wonderful things: answer the phone in several, customizable voices with Eliza-like abilities to keep the conversation going, integrate various household electronics, serve as worthy opponents in various games, and household inventory control. His withdrawn son, traumatized by the death of his mother in an auto accident, takes a real shine to the toys and programs them for all sorts of things, helped by his older sister. The protagonist finds out that the chips used in the Thinkertoys were originally designed as a Cold War weapon. They were to be dropped behind enemy lines to conduct various acts of subtle industrial sabotage: jam electronics, loosen valves, start fires, and mess up bearings. The children eventually use the toys to try and kill their father (The cold, impatient, malicious intelligence of the children reminded me of those in Brunner’s Children of the Thunder.). As to why, they explain, simply, “He was driving.”, referring to the auto accident that killed their mother. Continue reading →

Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural

marzaat2 Comments

A retro review from May 28, 2012:

Review: Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural, Jim Steinmeyer, 2008.Charles Fort.jpg

The influence of Charles Fort on popular culture isn’t that of some seeping, hidden stream percolating out of the depths of history to mysteriously water modern ideas. It’s more of a shaded river whose twisting path abuts a surprising number of cultural vegetation. The subtitle is a bit of marketing hyperbole. As Steinmeyer himself notes, Fort said the word “supernatural” had no place in his vocabulary, no meaning. But his peculiar works, four bizarre mixtures of satire and philosophy; compendiums of strange events and sometimes whimsical, sometimes sinister, sometimes absent explanations, known as The Complete Books of Charles Fort: The Book of the Damned / Lo! / Wild Talents / New Lands, are an important source stream for the torrents of writing on the paranormal the 20th century saw, Berlitz and von Daniken, ufology and raining frogs. His works are explicitly referenced in horror fiction as long ago as H. P. Lovecraft and as contemporaneously as Stephen King and Caitlin Kiernan. His ideas show up in the film Magnolia and an actual character in the recent movie The Whisperer in Darkness. He even gave us the word “teleportation”. And, of course, his name lives on in that indispensable journal of oddities, The Fortean Times.

This isn’t the first work from a major publisher on Fort. Damon Knight, the science fiction writer, did the worthy biography Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained in 1970. But this has several advantages, besides availability, over Knight’s work. Not only does this work have photographs, but it also has numerous quotes from Fort’s earlier writings before 1920’s The Book of the Damned as well as the reactions, in private and in reviews, to those works. There are also selections from Fort’s unpublished autobiography Many Parts. This edition helpfully sets these quotes off in italics which further makes this a handsome production. After an unhappy childhood under a domineering and sometimes violent upper-middle class father, Fort left home at 17; worked as newspaper reporter for about three years; bummed about America, South Africa, Canada, and Britain for a couple of years; and returned home where he married, in 1896, Anna, a woman four years his senior. For the next 12 years, Fort and Anna lived poorly, supported by numerous stories, mostly of a realistic nature and noted for the verisimilitude of their dialogue and setting, that were published in several well-known magazines of the time. These brought him to the attention of Theodore Dreiser who was to become a lifelong friend. Dreiser used his growing reputation and fame to get Fort’s first novel published: The Outcast Manufacturers. Steinmeyer presents some interesting selections from this comic yet realistic novel of slum dwellers – usefully drawn from the Fort’s own impoverished circumstances. Continue reading →

Dreadful Sanctuary

marzaat2 Comments

In honor of Megan’s review of Three to Conquer at From Couch to Moon, and to note my return from travels during which, I will add, only one book was purchased (though many magazines — think of it as an alcoholic dropping the bourbon for lager), I give you more hard-bitten Eric Frank Russell.

Dreadful Sanctuary

Raw Feed (2002): Dreadful Sanctuary, Eric Frank Russell, 1948, 1963.

I decided to read this book because, like Russell’s Sinister Barrier, it is inspired by Fortean ideas according to an article on Charles Fort and Erick Frank Russell by sf author and critic David Langford. The specific inspiration was, according to Langford, Fort’s lost manuscript (written prior to his Book of the Damned) X. (Oddly enough, Damon Knight, in his biography of Fort, doesn’t mention this connection though he talks about Russell’s memberships in the Fortean Society and Sinister Barrier and also about X).

The novel is written in sort of a not always successful, sometimes forced sounding, wise-cracking style of hardboiled detective stories. The basic premise — that Earth is literally an insane asylum for the dregs of the Solar System — certainly is Fortean. (The specifics are that each of the four inner planets of the Solar System evolved separate humanoid races roughly equal in development and intelligence. Blacks evolved from Mercury. Brown-skinned people evolved on Venus. Earth natives were Orientals, and whites evolved on Mars. This also sounds a little like Theosophy.) The Martians discover space travel first. All the non-Terran humanoids discover a way of proving definite sanity, and exile (humanely in their eyes) all their insane people, the ones stopping the development of further civilization, to Earth. Sanity is a dominant gene, and some people, members of the international conspiracy known as the Norman Club (dedicated to destroying rocket expeditions to Venus in order to keep the insane Earthmen from breaking out) know their extraterrestrial origins. Some religious figures were missionaries from other planets (except the native born Confucius).

The Norman Club is in occasional contact with the Martians. At least, this is the story big, quick shooting, quick punching protagonist (and inventor — Russell has lots of radio and electronic jargon in this story set in 1972 where videophones and tv delivered papers exist) John J. Armstrong uncovers at both ends of various interrogations. However, at the end, it is strongly hinted that Dr. Horowitz, who claims to be a Martian, is really just a clever, power-hungry scientist who has talked his way into the leadership of the deluded Norman Club. Langford claims that, in editions prior to this 1963 revision, Armstrong gets to Mars and proves no society of white Martians exist. In this edition, he fails in his mission to show a Venus journey is possible and dies in space. (Talk of creating a “new psychic factor” by making this journey is very typical of sf from the 40s and 50s — the date of this novel’s original composition — since it carries a implication of a true social science.) The cult of the Norman Club is triumphant. The exact rationale of making the desperate Venus voyage at novel’s end was lost on me. If the fuel supply has been sabotaged, the extra fuel for a test flight might make a journey to Venus possible, but, given the facts presented, it would seem the spaceship would still blow up on the return trip. I’m now curious to read an earlier version of the novel. All in all, while Russell kept the plot going with conspiracy (and the rather deus ex machina super lie detector called the “schizophraser”) and lots of action, I don’t think it worked as well, especially in its hurried ending, as Russell’s Sinister Barrier.

I also found the reference to a “short-wave therapy set” peculiar. Did Russell, in 1948, somehow think the quack radionics of Albert Abrams, thoroughly discredited in the 1920s, would really pan out? On the other hand, variations of Abrams’ ideas were being sold (and scientifically tested) in the late 40s and 50s.

 

More reviews of fantastic fiction are indexed by title and author/editor.