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Posted: 20-12-2001 00:38 Post subject: Famous Forteans

1. Neil Gaiman.

(From Sunday, September 02, 2001)
http://www.neilgaiman.com/archive/2001_09_01_archive.asp

"And while we're waiting for the FAQ etc thing to get up and running (ho! says older-but-wiser author in a hollow and sceptical voice) I thought I'd answer a few more questions. My favorite recent one was that someone wanted to know about me and Charles Fort, and whether I considered myself a Fortean. I suppose I do. I had to hunt down my Charles Fort books when I was a young teenager, after reading some article in an old SF magazine trashing him (from memory, the article was called something like Lo! The Bold Forteans and was by someone like Willy Ley, and I realised that this was the same Fort that Eric Frank Russell and R. A. Lafferty talked about), and I went down to my bookshop and ordered a copy of the Dover books Complete Charles Fort. And was struck by the poetry, and the delight in ideas. The pickle people. The jelly in the sky (which is why stars twinkle, of course.) Maybe we're property. How to measure a circle. Raining Fish (which one day I was to have a lot of fun with in Good Omens although I'm pretty sure it was Terry who first popped Fort into Adam's hands in the book -- I remember the sheer joy of writing the Fortean version of Radio 4's perennial Gardener's Question Time...) I read him with the same delight, and with the same part of my head, and at the same time as I read E.E. Cummings' prose essays.

There's a story about Charles Fort and Karl Marx that sits in my head in the attic of unwritten stories, on the same shelf in my mind as the one about Kenneth Williams and Kenneth Halliwell. One day..."

Posted: 28-12-2001 02:49 Post subject:

Two famous Forteans,and fellow Indiana natives,were popular late 19th and early 20th Century writers Theodore Dreiser and Booth Tarkington.Dreiser convinced his publisher,Boni & Liveright,to publish"The Book of the Damned"in 1919.He was also a founding member of the original Fortean Society,and Tarkington was an early member,too.

Dreiser was instrumental in Fort's early career as well as being one of his best friends.Tarkington is perhaps best known now as the author of"The Magnificent Ambersons",which was made into a film by Orson Welles.

Posted: 15-05-2003 03:30 Post subject:

i enjoy Neil gaiman's writing a great deal (not really intersted in graphic novels to be honest) and interestingly enough i recently found out that he is an escapee from the church of $cientology as his father was apparently a very senior scientologist in the UK.

Edit: Big correction! Neil's father is not merely big in UK scientology it seems but is a major player in the organisation:

Posted: 15-05-2003 09:07 Post subject:

FT recently had a quote from William Gibson on the front cover. Faggus enquired about it in the FT Sightings thread, but didn't get an answer.

Checking Gibson's blog on his website, I found he had this to say:

"Am at least equally boggled at FORTEAN TIMES putting my "I am a Fortean" quote on their cover. You can't mess around with this stuff, can you? (However, I actually do consider myself a Fortean, and FT really is my favorite magazine.)"

What's going on?!

Posted: 15-05-2003 11:05 Post subject:

Charles Fort has been associated with some of the most momentous events in Irish history...

Wink

Posted: 15-05-2003 18:00 Post subject:

Alan Moore, another graphic novelist, I believe said that FT is the greatest publication on the earth (:)or words to that effect) and uses events popularized in Fort (I have only read From Hell, but near the end a rain of blood in 1888 around the mediterannean is involved)

Posted: 15-05-2003 18:03 Post subject:

Posted: 19-06-2003 03:00 Post subject:

i wonder matt groening is a fortean aswell
in the 1st episode of futurama where fry and bender are having a drink to gether for the first time bender picks up a bottle of old fortean

so i wonder if matt groening could get back to us? to comfirm
or deney?

Posted: 19-06-2003 04:45 Post subject:

Just watched the relevant scene (complete with commentary) on DVD. It's actually "Old Fortran" - a reference to the programming language.

Still, he does (or rather, his shows do) reference many fortean subjects and urban legends.

Posted: 20-06-2003 19:33 Post subject:

but it did look like "old fortean" when i 1st saw it
oh well never mind then
but thanks anome

Posted: 10-01-2005 03:20 Post subject: Eric Frank Russell

I was looking up some information about a science fiction novel from the Fifties, Wasp (1957), by Eric Frank Russell, when I discovered that:

Posted: 10-01-2005 03:39 Post subject:

Beadle?

Posted: 10-01-2005 03:50 Post subject:

Posted: 10-01-2005 11:59 Post subject:

AM: Sorry it wasn't really an answer to your question - I was just dropping his name into the list of famous Forteans. Wink

Posted: 10-01-2005 17:16 Post subject:

Is Arthur C. Clarke too obvious to mention here?