TLS reviews Fortean Times

Copyright 2018, InterAmerica, Inc.

TLS (Times Literary Supplement), in its October 16, 2018 issue, reviews what it calls “a ‘journal of weird record’ with a hard hat approach,” Fortean Times.

The reviewer, Robert Irwin (an author) writes, favorably, that Fortean Times “prevailing tone … is hard hat. If a phenomenon can be explained scientifically, then it has been explained satisfactorily … Sources have to be investigated, and if common sense can sort things out, then common sense should prevail.” [Page 8]

But Mr. Irwin is not so sanguine about the man the “journal” (their word) is named after: Charles Hoy Fort [1874-1937].

“Yet, though the magazine proclaims its loyalty to the vision of Fort, I suspect that, if resurrected, he [Fort] would no be entirely happy with what he might read in it. Fort’s writings were disorganized …

“Fort assembled reports of strange phenomena without troubling to research their provenance or consider their intrinsic plausibility. He was not interested in explanations, and he often expressed his hostility to scientific methodology. Science was merely ‘a mutilated octopus.’ …though his was a great enterprise, he did not take it seriously.” [ibid]

“H.G. Wells … in a letter to Theodore Dreiser … characterized Fort as a damnable bore who wrote like a drunkard.” [ibid]

“Dreiser was the first president of the Fortean Society and Fort’s friends and admirers included Ben Hecht, John Cowper Powys, Sherwood Anderson and Booth Tarkington. The Book of the Damned and its sequels have been drawn on by science fiction writers including Eric Frank Russell, Robert Heinlein and Philip K. Dick.” [ibid]

Jenny Randles and UFOs are mentioned, as is the so-called Salzburg Cube, often “reported to be a ‘cube of pure steel from Salzburg in Austria, perfectly fashioned and with a groove in the centre, unearthed in fossil layers and therefore not the handiwork of any known civilization’ It turns out, however, that this undistinguished lump of slag iron, probably cast later in an iron foundry, is not actually a cube and its groove is not perfect.”

While the Fortean Times gets a little off kilter with its speculations, reviewer Irwin writes that “One of the magazine’s main strengths is its actively engaged readership …” [ibid]

And “The Fortean Times, a journal of weird record, keeps opening doors to alternative universes, hitherto unguessed-at possibilities and prospects of paradise or conspiratorial menace before slowly and reluctantly closing those doors.” [ibid]

RR