
All concern the bizarre phenomena unexplained by traditional science that the author spent the better part of three decades documenting: flying saucers, telekinesis, sudden showers of fish from the sky, stigmata, poltergeists, and spontaneous combustion (to name a few). Fort's florid style and freakish subjects were much criticized by his contemporaries, but he was defended and admired by an equal number of readers, including such noteworthies as Theodore Dreiser, Clarence Darrow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Stimulating, bewildering, and intoxicating, this intellectual tour de force is a must for lovers of science fiction as well as science facts.
The Complete Books of Charles Fort
This scholarly exploration of the borderlands between science and fantasy features four complete works by the redoubtable Charles Fort (1874-1932):
Excerpt:
The Book of the Damned
pp. 212-213
If it is our acceptance that, out of the Negative Absolute, the Positive Absolute is generating itself, recruiting, or maintaining itself, via a third sate, or our own quasi-state, it would seem that we're trying to conceive of Universalness manufacturing more Universalness from Nothingness.
Take that up yourself, if you're willing to run the risk of disappearing with such velocity that you'll leave an incandescent train behind, and risk being infinitely happy forever, whereas you probably don't want to be happy-I'll side-step that myself, and try to be intelligible by regarding the Positive Absolute from the aspect of Realness instead of Universalness, recalling that Realness and Universalness we mean the same state, or that which does not merge away into something else, because there is nothing else. So the idea is that out of Unrealness, instead of Nothingness, Realness, instead of Universalness, instead of Nothingness, Realness, instead of Universalness, is, via our own quasi-state, manufacturing more Realness. Just so, but in relative terms, of course, all imaginings that materialize into machines or statues, buildings, dollars, paintings or books in paper and ink are graduations from unrealness to realness-in relative terms.
It would seem then that Intermediateness is a relation between the Positive Absolute and the Negative Absolute. But the absolute cannot be the related-of course a confession that we can't really thing of it at all, if here we think of a limit to the unlimited. Doing the best we can, and encouraged by the reflection that we can't do worse than has bee done by metaphysicians in the past, we accept that the absolute can't be the related. So then that our quasi-state is not a real relation, if nothing in it is real. On the other hand, it is not an unreal relation, if nothing in it is unreal. It seems thinkable that the Positive Absolute can, by means of Intermediateness, have a quasi-relation, or be only quasi-related, or be the unrelated, in final terms, or, at least, not be the related, in final terms.
As to free will and Intermediatism-same answer as to everything else. By free will we mean Independence-or that which does not merge away into something else-so, in Intermediateness, neither free-will nor slave-will-but a different approximation for every so-called person toward one or the other of the extremes. The hackneyed way of expressing this seems to me to be the acceptable way, if in Intermediateness, there is only the paradoxical: that we're free to do what we have to do.
I am not convinced that we make a fetish of the preposterous. I think our feeling is that in first gropings there's no knowing what will afterward be the acceptable. I think that if an early biologist heard of birds that grow on trees, he should record that had heard of birds that grow on trees: then let sorting over of data occur afterward. The one thing that we try to tone down but that is to a great degree unavoidable is having our data all mixed up like Long Island and Florida in the minds of early American explorers. My own notion is that this whole book is very much like a map of North America in which the Hudson River is set down as a passage leading to Siberia. We think of Monstrator and Melanicus and of a world that is now in communication with this earth: if so, secretly, with certain esoteric ones upon this earth. Whether that world's Monstrator and Monstrator's Melanicus-must be the subject of later inquiry. It would be a gross thing to do: solve up everything now and leave nothing to our disciples.
End Excerpt
Hardbound, 6x9, 1126 pages