This is a fantastic book. I will never think the same again, particularly about science fiction and its conscious attempt to see and control the ‘motor of history’ in the weird. Think to New Worlds is about the reception history of Charles Hoyes Fort (1874–1932) and the ‘damned’; that is, that which has been excluded from modern thought and science. Fort authored one novel (The Outcast Manufacturers, 1909), and four books of anomalies drawn mostly from newspapers and journals (The Book of the Damned, 1919; New Lands, 1923; Lo! 1931; Wild Talents, 1932). Through the latter, he advanced a hilarious but also quite serious hyphenated intermediatism, which is what he called his own position: a truth-fiction (again, his own hyphenated expression), itself based on a monism or underlying oneness that he captured in the homely image of an all-encompassing cheese. All is cheese, including the mouse that appears in it for a time. Nothing that appears in the cheese is unreal, but neither is anything quite real. Except the cheese.

The book is organized around the life of Tiffany Thayer (1902–59), who co-founded the Fortean Society and came to edit the society’s magazine, Doubt. Buhs teaches us in biographical specificity about Thayer, who defined much of the movement from the 1930s until the last year of the 1950s, for better and for ill. Buhs does not sugarcoat. He also includes some bracing thoughts on the contemporary US political scene.

Think to New Worlds is a literarily beautiful and intellectually sophisticated treatment of science fiction, surrealist and modern art, the UFO phenomenon (the cover is gorgeous), modernism and postmodernism, and conspiracy thinking in American politics. Buhs demonstrates any number of theses, including the theme that the literary history of Fort is the history of avant-garde modernism as it transitioned out of earlier Luciferian Romantic and decadent literature eras. Modernism, it turns out, is suffused with occultism and the amazing from the very beginning as forms of radical reflexivity, a kind of paradoxical (dis)enchantment that was at once sceptical and believing.

In Fort, though, there is always a kind of laughing transcendence. For example, these ‘talents,’ as he called what some of our ancestors billed as ‘witchcraft’, happen in actual human history, but they are inevitably ‘wild’; that is, not controllable and fundamentally mischievous. This does not quite place Fort in what would become postmodernism and the ironic rejection of all grand narratives and ontological truths. He was too much after that underlying oneness. Even more radically (and much more intermediate), perhaps the assumed distinction between experience and interpretation in the wild talents or witchcraft is mistaken from the start. Certainly, scholarship has challenged the distinction between the two, even if it has not chosen Fort’s intermediatism or materializing truth-fiction. The reader gets the impression that Buhs knows this distinction of indistinction (the cheese again).

Another major theme of the books is that the reception history of Fort is tied up closely with science fiction and its futurism, with fans positioning themselves as mutant visionaries into the ‘motor of history’ that can be glimpsed working precisely in the strange, the weird and the impossible. The imagination is not just a spinner of fantasies here. It is also a medium of the surreal or super-real depths of the cosmos, a way to see this secret engine at work on a psychological and spiritual level, but also on a social, political and even physical one.

Think to New Worlds accomplishes exactly what Buhs sets out to do, and his work should be publicly celebrated and read widely. It is as accessible to geeky science fiction readers as to historians of science and technology (or their students on any level). On a selfish note, I am not always certain that Fort was as materialist, mundane or multifarious as Buhs paints him be. I suspect that Fort’s monism is not materialistic in the usual sense of the word – maybe materialistic-immaterial, to re-employ the intermediatism.

But my main point goes beyond, really before, all of this: serious interest in the anomalous far pre-dates late nineteenth- or twentieth-century modernism, going back as far as we can see and around the world in the history of magic, for example. Witchcraft, indeed. What is so new, so ‘modern’, is Fort’s infectious humor, which some of us can laugh with because, in some sense, we are it. Certainly, Fort’s central notion that reality is not what it seems to be, and that we are sufferers of the strange that we experience, seldom conscious willing subjects (‘I think we’re property,’ as he famously wrote in The Book of the Damned), is central to what we think of as the modern ‘academy’. Thinking to new worlds here, after all, in some sense begins with the story of ‘Plato’s cave’ in the fifth century BCE and a profound distrust of sensory-based and metaphorically chained knowledge. It also affirms a genuine gnosis outside the cave in the sunlight. Such a gnosis is not just Plato. This is Fort, too, at least a grinning one.

Perhaps this also explains my own reservations about the adequacy of any social history. Social conditions there always are, of course, but these are never sufficient to explain the experiences of the strange, which are common around the globe, despite any such particular social conditions. Closer to home and to our own time, for example, similar fascinations were present in Friedrich Nietzsche, who, despite the nihilistic reception of his thought, ended his life teaching about the coming superhumans in a non-Darwinian evolutionary mode and the circularity of time (not to mention ‘time travel’) well before Fort or science fiction. So, too, the sci-fi notion of taking control of the motor of history through some kind of conscious process is at the root of earlier notions of ritual magical practice, self-deification and becoming one with the cosmos. That process is given a new form, of course, in twentieth-century Fortean modernism, but the baseline notion is not entirely distinct. I suppose nothing is ‘in the cheese’.