A seminal portrait of an influential early twentieth-century chronicler of the paranormal evaluates his role in challenging period orthodoxies associated with various supernatural phenomena, in an account that evaluates his investigations into both scientific and otherworldly theories. 15,000 first printing.

"This book is about Charles Fort, his followers, and the surprising influence they have had on science fiction, the avant-garde, UFOlogy, and more broadly on the role of spirituality and conspiracy in the modern world. Fort was an author and maverick philosopher who wrote four non-fiction books about anomalies-rains of frogs, mysterious disappearances, unexplained lights in the sky-for which he offered hypotheses that even he did not (always) accept as true. His books developed into a monistic philosophy that denounced science as a machine for generating truth. In his view, science was a small part of a larger system in which truth and falsity were constantly transforming one into the other. This was not a rejection of the modern world but, instead, its fulfillment: Fort prophesied the next stage in intellectual evolution after the scientific era. He inspired four overlapping groups: members of the Fortean Society; science fiction fans and writers; avant-garde artists; and flying saucer enthusiasts. First We Must Think to New Worlds takes up each of these groups in turn to ask: How can the human imagination be expanded? What is the fundamental structure of the universe? And, how does power move? As they developed their responses, Fort's followers mixed Forteanism with Fundamentalism, New Agery, and conspiracy, as well as a host of other forms of modern enchantments, such as the ironic imagination, scientific wonder, and Theosophical syncretism. Each chapter is interrupted by and concludes with shorter sections that focus on particular Forteans or Fortean events as a way to deepen themes"--

The Book of the Damned, Lo!, Wild Talents, New Lands. Greatest compilation of data: flying saucers, strange disappearances, inexplicable data not recognized by science. Painstakingly documented.

In A Feeling of Wrongness, Joseph Packer and Ethan Stoneman confront the rhetorical challenge inherent in the concept of pessimism by analyzing how it is represented in an eclectic range of texts on the fringes of popular culture, from adult animated cartoons to speculative fiction. Packer and Stoneman explore how narratives such as True Detective, Rick and Morty, Final Fantasy VII, Lovecraftian weird fiction, and the pop ideology of transhumanism are better suited to communicate pessimistic affect to their fans than most carefully argued philosophical treatises and polemics. They show how these popular nondiscursive texts successfully circumvent the typical defenses against pessimism identified by Peter Wessel Zapffe as distraction, isolation, anchoring, and sublimation. They twist genres, upend common tropes, and disturb conventional narrative structures in a way that catches their audience off guard, resulting in belief without cognition, a more rhetorically effective form of pessimism than philosophical pessimism. While philosophers and polemicists argue for pessimism in accord with the inherently optimistic structures of expressive thought or rhetoric, Packer and Stoneman show how popular texts are able to communicate their pessimism in ways that are paradoxically freed from the restrictive tools of optimism. A Feeling of Wrongness thus presents uncharted rhetorical possibilities for narrative, making visible the rhetorical efficacy of alternate ways and means of persuasion.

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