Hot on the heels of my recent long blog post on “Lovecraft and Charles Fort” comes a new book. My post could only recommend the book The Fortean Influence on Science Fiction (2020). But the latest Reason magazine (ever alert to the forces of unreason) reviews Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and his Followers (University of Chicago Press) and thus alerted me to another one. The new book is set for release on the 3rd of July 2024.
The book’s 394-pages survey not only the influence on imaginative writers, paranormal research and crypto-zoology (‘Bigfoot’ etc), but also what the Reason review calls “the libertarian-leaning strains of Fort’s following, from the San Francisco Renaissance to the Discordians”. These are left unexplained by the reviewer and may be unknown outside of a West Coast crowd of a certain age. So I should perhaps explain that the former references the 1950s/60s Beat generation writers (Ginsberg, Burroughs et al), and the latter a prank religion perhaps best known to science-fiction readers via mentions its primary text Principia Discordia in the infamous Illuminatus! Trilogy of the mid 1970s.
On searching the Google Books version of Think to New Worlds (already online), “Lovecraft” gets 17 hits. So his posthumous intertwingling with Fort is not ignored.