Wild Talents Read Free

modernist and postmodernist; one of the first writers of the century to recognize what we now call cognitive dissonance. And, for one so driven to focus upon science, when he turns his attention to other aspects of the Data he makes some of his most unsettling observations.

    There have been suggestions of an occult control upon the minds of the inhabitants of this earth. Let anybody who does not like the idea that his mind may be most subtly controlled, without his knowledge of it, think back to what propagandists did with his beliefs in the years 1914-1918. Also, he need not think so far back as that.

    Nor, do we.

    ***

    The Book of the Damned sold well enough, going into a second printing. One day Fort went to the Library's Reference Room, where he spent so many years doing research, and asked to see a copy. The librarian noted it was filed under "Literature, Crank." The librarian assured him it could not be considered otherwise. "Forces are moving me," he wrote Dreiser, explaining that he'd burned the tens of thousands of his notes and forever taken leave of the institution. In late 1920 he and Anna moved to London, where almost immediately he headed for the Main Reference Room of the British Library to begin taking a new series of notes. Their life in London was no more exciting than it was in New York; in the evenings he and Anna had quiet dinners, or went to the movies. He wrote his second book, New Lands, which Boni & Liveright published in 1923. Focusing to a large degree on the theories and foibles of astronomers, filled with so many cited references as The Book of The Damned , the mounting of the data combined with the near-uniformity of the subject matter makes this the most challenging of Fort's books when read more than once. Yet between star and telescope his style continues to strengthen, and ideas continue to tumble forth, to be taken up again later on.

    Lost tribes and the nations that have disappeared from the face of this earth -- that the skies have reeked with terrestrial civilizations, spreading out in celestial stagnations, where their remains to this day may be. The Mayans -- and what became of them? Bones of the Mayans, picked white as frost by space-scavengers, regioned to this day in a sterile luxuriousness somewhere, spread upon existence like the pseudo-breath of Death, crystalized on a sky-plane.

    In their flat in Marchmont Street Fort had many thousands of new notes, which he stored in a pigeonholed cabinet, filed in accordance with his own systems. Along with his continuing trips to the library he began corresponding with readers and nascent Forteans who wished to pass along their appreciation and, more importantly, clippings about or even records of their own researches into local phenomena. Although science fiction writers of the thirties and later tended to view Fort as Fort may have viewed the average astronomer, among his early correspondents were later SF writers Miriam Allen DeFord, Maynard Shipley, Edmond Hamilton, and Eric Frank Russell. Tiffany Thayer wrote, as well, and so began that exchange. Dreiser visited the Forts shortly after the publication of An American Tragedy . He was deeply saddened when Fort told him he'd burned both X and Y along with the 40,000 notes when he left New York.

    ***

    Fort finished his next book in 1924. Called, initially, Skyward Ho! it remained in typescript for many years. Boni & Liveright turned it down, sales of New Lands being (understandably) much lower than those of his first book. He and Anna moved back to New York in 1928, finding a place on West 124th Street. He returned to the Main Reference Room and began anew to take notes, although by now his eyesight was so worsening that it was harder and at last impossible to do research or even read, every day. Much of his time he spent creating and developing a game he called Super-checkers, which involved a large cloth gingham sheet and many, many thumbtacks pierced through with cardboard to serve