Fortean-themed music, from opera to metal

Prompted by some comments on a previous post, I thought I'd write something about "UFO-themed songs". But after looking into it, I decided there isn't really anything I can add to the many times it's been done before (even Wikipedia has a list of songs about close encounters with aliens). Instead, I've decided to focus on a selection of more substantial musical works (e.g. operas and concept albums, such as those pictured above) that fit my broad definition of "fortean". These include several less well-known items, including some I discovered while researching my two books about music - SofSFM (2020) and SofM (2023). Here's what I came up with, grouped under the 6 headings of Aliens, Ghosts, Atlantis, Esoteric Traditions, Science Fiction and Comics.

ALIENS

Christus Apollo (1969) by Jerry Goldsmith. An obscure work by a far-from-obscure composer, this was one of several interesting discoveries I made while writing SofSFM. It's a religious cantata with words by SF writer Ray Bradbury, portraying Christ as a spacefaring super-being known by different names on different planets.

Alien Encounter (1996) by Phil Thornton - a purely instrumental album with tracks including "Arrival of the Mothership" and "Visions from the Homeworld". It comes from one of my all-time favourite CD labels, New World Music, which was particularly popular in the 1990s. I've got quite a collection of these  - other artists on the label include Medwyn Goodall and Terry Oldfield (brother of Mike Oldfield).

GHOSTS

There's never been any shortage of operas with supernatural themes - several of them featured in my Fortean Opera post. Here are two more:
 
The Lighthouse (1980) by Peter Maxwell Davies - another discovery I made while writing SofSFM. It's based on the same real-world "Flannan Isle incident" as the 1977 Doctor Who serial "Horror of Fang Rock". In the latter, the mysterious disappearance of the lighthouse-keepers is down to an alien; in the opera, it's caused by a series of ghostly apparitions.

The Turn of the Screw (1954) by Benjamin Britten. This is based on the classic "psychological" ghost story of the same name by Henry James - but whereas the ghosts turn out to be imaginary in the original version, in the opera they're very real.

ATLANTIS

Eagle-eyed readers will notice that one of the CDs pictured above also featured in my recent post about Lemuria - and that's the 2004 album of that name by the symphonic metal band Therion. But there are two other albums worth mentioning in this category that I only have in intangible form in my Spotify library:

Atlantis (1969) by Sun Ra. A fascinating individual who claimed to come from the planet Saturn, Sun Ra featured prominently in SofSFM. But not all his albums are about outer space - this one has tracks called Mu, Lemuria, Yucatan and Bimini, as well as the really excellent 22-minute title track.

Atlantis Ascendant (2001) by Bal-Sagoth - another symphonic metal band, and definitely my favourite (their music always makes me think of a Masters of the Universe cartoon, for some reason). Their concept albums also have really great plots; according to Wikipedia, this one "centres on the exploits of a fictional 19th-century archaeologist and adventurer who has dedicated his life to the field of antediluvian anthropology".

ESOTERIC TRADITIONS

Voyage of the Acolyte (1975) by Steve Hackett - the esoteric tradition in this case being the Tarot. All the tracks are inspired by specific Tarot cards, such as "Hands of the Priestess", "The Hermit" and "Shadow of the Hierophant". There's also a Tarot connection in The Lighthouse, as PMD explains in the liner notes: "The structure is based on the Tower of the Tarot, whose number symbolism is present in all the music".

Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973) by Yes, based on Hindu mysticism. In its original form as a vinyl double album, each of the four sides comprised a single "movement" relating to the four categories of Hindu scripture: the shruti (revealing), the smriti (remembering), the puranas (ancients) and the tantras (rituals).

Zos Kia Cultus (2002) by Behemoth. A previously unsuspected music genre I discovered while writing SofM was what you might call "highbrow" metal, and of the bands I listened to, Behemoth was the one I liked best. This particular album is based on the occult writings of Austin Osman Spare, who I first heard of when he featured on the cover of Fortean Times in March 2001.

Masonic Music (1783-91) by Mozart. I mentioned last week that The Magic Flute was featured in my Fortean Opera post, one reason being its inclusion of a Masonic-style secret society. Mozart himself was a Freemason, and this CD contains several works incorporating Masonic ideas. One in particular, the "Little German Cantata" of 1791, must have seemed as blasphemous to some listeners as Goldsmith's Christus Apollo, with its reference to "the creator of the universe, whether named Jehovah, or God, or Fu, or Brahma" (Fu being a Chinese deity and Brahma a Hindu one).

Also featured in my Fortean Opera list was Wagner's Parsifal, which could equally fit here with its strange fusion of the Grail legend with the mystical writings of Schopenhauer. It features quite strongly in Philip K. Dick's novel VALIS (1981), which brings me neatly to the next item...

(Fortean) SCIENCE FICTION

VALIS (1987) by Tod Machover - a short opera based on Dick's novel. Most of PKD's writings are fortean to some extent, but none more so than the mishmash of metaphysics, religion, alien super-intelligence and conspiracy theories that is VALIS. As for the opera, it's discussed in some detail in SofSFM, so all I'll say here is that anything that combines Wagner and rock music has got to be worth a listen.

The Chronicle of the Black Sword (1985) by Hawkwind. There's always been a close connection between Hawkwind and the writings of Michael Moorcock, but this album (their best, in my opinion) has particularly strong fortean credentials, being based on the adventures of Moorcock's sword-and-sorcery hero, Elric of Melniboné.

(Fortean) COMICS

The Power Cosmic (1999) by Bal-Sagoth. No excuses for mentioning this band a second time, as even the album title reflects one of Marvel's more fortean superheroes, the Silver Surfer. He's also referenced, under his real name of Norrin Radd of Zenn La, in the song "The Scourge of the Fourth Celestial Host", together with several other Marvel characters, including Arishem of the Celestials - the archetypal "ancient alien".

Miss Anthropocene (2020) by Grimes. There were two reasons I sought this album out while writing SofM: (a) I was under instructions to include popular young artists, and (b) she'd spoken out in praise of AI in music, which was one of the topics in the last chapter of the book. I have to say I enjoyed her style much more than I expected, and was pleasantly surprised to find two songs inspired by the distinctly fortean comics that Jack Kirby did for DC in the 1970s: "Darkseid" and "New Gods".

While I could have found plenty more items to go in the preceding categories, that's not true here, as beyond those two albums I'm not aware of any other fortean comic-inspired music (unless you want to include "Grimly Fiendish" by The Damned). But there's a picture of Doctor Strange on the cover of the Pink Floyd album A Saucerful of Secrets (1968), and he's as fortean as superheroes get (see my post Master of the Mystic Arts). The picture, drawn by Marie Severin, is taken from Strange Tales #158, and it's quite hard to see unless you peer very closely. Here's a photograph I took of my CD version, where I've  contrast-enhanced the relevant part (and outlined it in red), to make it a little clearer:
 

The Fortean Influence on Science Fiction - book review

Pictured on the left above is my copy of the first issue of Unknown magazine, featuring Sinister Barrier by Eric Frank Russell - which I referred to as the first Fortean novel in a post on this blog back in 2011 (see also Pulp Forteana from 2014 for more on Russell). The book on the right, with the same picture on the cover, is a copy of Tanner F. Boyle's The Fortean Influence on Science Fiction, which Fortean Times sent me for review when it came out in 2021. My 5-star review duly appeared in FT 405, but having recently revived this blog it seems an obvious choice to reprint here. So without further ado, here it is:

With so much subject matter in common, from extraterrestrials and time travellers to ESP and alternate realities, it’s no surprise that the histories of forteana and SF are intertwined. Fortean Times, for example, might not exist if founding editor Bob Rickard hadn’t picked up the collected works of Charles Fort at an SF convention in the 1960s. The influence goes in the opposite direction too, from forteana to SF – and as the title indicates, that’s Tanner Boyle’s main focus in this book (though there’s a secondary theme too, which I’ll come to later).

It’s remarkable, given the high profile that SF enjoys today – and Fort’s relative obscurity – how much the genre owes to him. As Boyle says, “without Fort, SF’s development would have been radically different”. A similar sentiment was voiced by one of the giants of SF, Arthur C. Clarke, who spoke of the “tremendous impact” Fort’s writing had on the field. A classic biography of Fort, Prophet of the Unexplained, was written by SF author Damon Knight, who agreed that “Fort’s influence on other writers is incalculable”.

One reason for this influence is easy to trace. Early pulp magazine editors enthusiastically pushed Fort’s ideas at their readers and writers. Astounding Stories, for example, serialized the entirety of Fort’s third book, Lo!, in 1934. This was how many people, Clarke included, first encountered Fort. A subsequent editor of Astounding, John W. Campbell, described Fort’s writings as a “magnificent source-book and challenge to readers and writers of SF”, which “probably averages one SF or fantasy plot idea to the page”.

Interestingly, Fort himself started out as a fiction writer. Boyle describes one of his stories, “A Radical Corpuscle”, dating from 1906 – “involving a group of cells who become aware that they are living within another organism, a larger, cosmic body”. This seems to prefigure Fort’s suggestion that humanity is just a tiny part of a bigger picture, achieving its most striking form in his notion that “we are property”.

That quotation has inspired no end of SF stories. Among the first was Eric Frank Russell’s Sinister Barrier, whose appearance in Astounding’s sister magazine Unknown is illustrated on Boyle’s cover. As Bob Rickard has recounted (FT312:48-51), Russell was a key figure in the development of both forteana and SF, albeit one who is largely forgotten today. That’s hardly true of Russell’s younger protégé, Arthur C. Clarke, whose masterpiece 2001 a Space Odyssey is a more famous take on the “we are property” trope. For that matter, many of us first learned of fortean phenomena through Clarke’s Mysterious World TV shows in the 1980s.

Clarke is one of several authors that Boyle devotes a whole chapter to. Another is Philip K. Dick, much of whose work seems to come straight from a passage in Fort’s Book of the Damned: “Ours is a pseudo-existence, and all appearances in it partake of its essential fictitiousness.” Yet apart from a brief reference in an early story, “The Indefatigable Frog”, it’s not clear from Dick’s writing that he had any interest in Fort’s work per se. Fortunately, Boyle is able to set the record straight here. He quotes an email from Dick’s widow, Tessa, confirming that he “read and admired Fort’s work” and avidly consumed biographical material on Fort. Dick also corresponded with fortean author Brad Steiger in the wake of the “mystical experience” that led to his semi-autobiographical novel VALIS – which, as Boyle says, “does at many points read like a technologically updated rendition of Fort’s theories”.

A secondary theme running through the book concerns what Boyle dubs “maybe-fiction”, referring to imaginative speculations on SF-like subjects which are presented as the truth. An intriguing characteristic of maybe-fiction is the way different authors develop and build on each other’s ideas, creating what Boyle calls “a vast web of intertextuality”. The result, as well as being impressive enough to persuade believers, provides a handily exploitable framework for SF authors. A good example is the way alternative historical narratives created by writers like Erich von Daniken and Zecharia Sitchin – which Boyle describes as a “wellspring of creativity” – can inspire anything from Ridley Scott’s Prometheus to at least one Scooby-Doo plotline.

The boundary between fiction and maybe-fiction is a blurred one. When Charles Fort embarked on The Book of the Damned, he wrote that “I’ve given up fiction ... or in a way I haven’t. I’m convinced that everything is fiction, so here I am in the same old line”. By coincidence or otherwise, several of the most successful purveyors of maybe-fiction, from Donald Keyhoe and John Keel to Whitley Strieber and Jacques Vallée, also produced works of “real” SF.

All in all Boyle has produced an engrossing and eye-opening book, which is well-researched and painstakingly referenced, and written in much the same style as a Fortean Times article. Unfortunately it’s been packaged as an academic work, with a price tag to match (though the ebook is more affordable). But if your budget can handle it, and you’re interested in the parallel histories of forteana and SF, it’s definitely worth checking out.

Going Down… Beneath the Bermuda Triangle

I’ve just read two stories – a longish novelette and a shortish novel, both dating from the 1970s – by an author I’d barely heard of, called Jane Gallion. Previously I’d only seen her name in the context of a notoriously violent post-apocalyptic novel called Biker, which dates from 1969 and is still banned in the UK. But the two stories I did get hold of are quite different in tone, and it’s a shame they’re not better known. They’re both clever, well-written and interesting, and the longer of the two is bordering on a masterpiece.

To start with the shorter story – it’s called “Beneath the Bermuda Triangle” and it was published in the June/July 1979 issue of Galaxy magazine. This was a few years after the Skull the Slayer comic series I mentioned earlier this year, and it’s just as wacky a take on the Bermuda Triangle mystery. It’s got jewel-smuggling hippies, malevolent aliens, survivors from Atlantis, underwater pyramids and the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

As far as I can tell, “Beneath the Bermuda Triangle” is the only story Jane Gallion ever wrote that doesn’t have any sex in it (apart from a couple of indirect references to Tantric Sex). But there is a tenuous connection to the world of erotica. The stand-in editor for that particular issue of Galaxy was “Hank Stine” – an alter-ego of Jean Marie Stine, who used the same byline on one of the avant-garde erotic novels published in the late sixties by the short-lived Essex House imprint (see my post about The Geek by Alice Louise Ramirez). Jane Gallion’s Biker was another Essex House novel – and according to an autobiographical note, she also worked as an editor there. At the same time, she seems to have been active in science fiction fandom – see this photograph of her (there were other links between Essex House and science fiction – Philip José Farmer also published several novels with them).

The novel I just read, and found so impressive, is called Going Down. In her autobiographical note (which dates from 1990), Jane Gallion says the book was written for Essex House but never published (partly because it broke two of their house rules – “no humour” and “no politics”). However, it was eventually published as an ebook in 2001, two years before the author died.

Unlike Biker (which is available as an ebook in America but not in Britain), Going Down is listed on the UK Kindle store, which is where I got it. I don’t think the listing does the book any favours – there’s no cover image or preview, the blurb is misleading and it’s classified as erotica, which it isn’t really – it’s a dystopian SF satire in which sex (or the suppression of sex) plays a significant role.

Going Down is written in the kind of avant-garde literary style that was popular in the early seventies – all in the present tense, and with no quotation marks around dialogue. In that sense, and in other ways, I found the style reminiscent of Barry Malzberg, who was one of the big name writers of the time. Thematically, on the other hand, the novel is closer to Philip K. Dick – all about a sharply stratified future society in which information is tightly controlled, and the government knows more about you than you do. The book’s structure is also reminiscent of PKD, with the point of view alternating between three different characters – one high up in government, one at the very bottom of society, and one who is a major figure in the (ultimately fruitless) rebel movement. Also, like both Dick and Malzberg, the novel has a strong undercurrent of humour, even though it’s basically a very angry book.

I mentioned science fiction portrayals of the future last week – and Going Down is one of the most prophetic I’ve come across. The society it describes is ultra-capitalist and ultra-puritanical. The government has electronic spying machines everywhere, ready to pounce at the first hint of subversive or “perverted” behaviour. Giant corporations charge people (who are always referred to as “consumers”) for absolutely everything – including having sex and going to the toilet. If you try to avoid paying for something, it’s a serious crime because it “damages the economy”. Also prescient (given recent headlines) is the utter hypocrisy of the ruling class, who impose puritanical laws on ordinary citizens while indulging in the most disgustingly obscene behaviour themselves.

Although Going Down was originally written in the early seventies, I’m not sure if it was revised for its ebook publication in 2001. If it wasn’t, then it contains one amazingly prescient reference. I can’t remember anyone back in the 1970s worrying about Genetically Modified crops, but one of the characters in the novel does. It’s in a scene between a high-ranking member of the government, named Hennering, and his boyfriend Penrod (“a slender lad of eighteen”). Hennering wishes to deep-throat a certain part of Penrod’s anatomy after said anatomical part has been thrust up a chicken’s backside:

The pullet had been organically raised. Penrod refused to have anything to do with a chicken exposed to genetically engineered or chemically adulterated food. He was afraid it might give him high blood pressure or possibly a rash. There’s a lot of that around. But Hennering made sure the bird was clean before he gave it to Penrod. Heavens to Betsy, he couldn’t have Penrod catching anything, could he?

This scene struck me as doubly prophetic – not just the reference to genetic engineering (and pathological aversion thereto), but also the way a conservative politician indulges in behaviour that’s so perverted it wouldn’t even cross a normal person’s mind. Remember this news story from a month ago?

Finnegans Wake

A few days ago I came across a Twitter account called Finnegans Wake and started following it. As far as I can tell, it’s tweeting the entire novel (written by the Irish author James Joyce between 1923 and 1939) a few words at a time. In an earlier post (Literary name-dropping), I mentioned that “I did go through a phase circa 1975 of trying very hard to read Finnegans Wake”. I can’t believe that was 40 years ago! Sounds like a cue for yet more nostalgic rambling...

Finnegans Wake is a difficult book, and I’m not going to pretend that I read more than a few pages here and there. I probably wouldn’t have managed even that without the assistance and encouragement of other books (some of which are pictured above). Back in 1975 I was 17 years old, and as thoroughly ignorant of history, geography, philosophy, religion, literature and linguistics as it’s possible for a human being to be. After four decades of being a boringly bookish bespectacled bachelor I’m a bit less ignorant, and flicking through the novel just now several things jumped out at me that would have gone over my head as a teenager. But the book is still as difficult to understand as ever!

The most obvious factor that makes Finnegans Wake difficult to read is the sheer number of made-up words it contains. But even if it was written in plain English it wouldn’t be an easy book. Basically it’s supposed to be a dream, which means the author can put anything he wants into it, without needing to be too clear or logical about it. It’s a very erudite dream, too, which flits from one arcane subject to another. There are several recurring themes, including some distinctly Fortean ones – for example Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society, and the metaphysical philosophy of Giordano Bruno (The man who invented aliens). James Joyce seems to have had a soft spot for Bruno, who was born in the Italian city of Nola – thus making him a Nolan, and hence a kind of honorary Irishman!

I had a look through the book for a suitably Fortean passage, and found the following account of a kind of spiritualist séance:

That was Communicator, a former colonel. A disincarnated spirit, called Sebastion, from the Rivera in Januero, (he is not all hear) may fernspreak shortly with messuages from my dead-ported. Let us cheer him up a little and make an appunkment for a future date. Hello, Commudicate! How’s the buttes? Ever-scepistic! He does not believe in our psychous of the Real Absence, neither miracle wheat nor soulsurgery of P. P. Quemby.

P. P. Quimby was an American faith healer and mesmerist in the 19th century – clearly someone to be deeply “scepistical” about, along with miracle-wheat and soul-surgery!

As I mentioned in my post about Literary name-dropping, Finnegans Wake is one of the many literary works referred to in Robert Silverberg’s novel Dying Inside, which I read in Galaxy magazine (pictured above, middle-left) in 1973. But the reference is only understandable with hindsight (“Joycean dream-gabble” and “Earwicker’s borborygmi”), and it was another two years before a number of other things made me decide Finnegans Wake was a book worth looking into.

The first and most important was James Blish’s science fiction novel A Case of Conscience (1958), which I read early in 1975. A subplot running through the first half of the book concerns the protagonist, a Jesuit priest, tackling a literary “case of conscience” which “the church had never cracked”. It comes from pages 572 and 573 of Finnegans Wake (“The procurator Interrogarius Mealterum presends us this proposer...”). Right on the first page of Blish’s novel, Finnegans Wake is described as “diabolically complex (that adverb was official, precisely chosen, and intended to be taken literally)”. Later he describes James Joyce as having a “mighty intellect, easily the greatest ever devoted to fiction in English and perhaps in any language.”

That in itself would probably have been enough to make me check out Joyce’s work, but – by the kind of synchronicity that often happens – I came across several other references to Finnegans Wake in SF stories I read around that time. I can’t remember all of them now, but two that stick in my mind are Philip José Farmer’s novella “Riders of the Purple Wage” (which appeared in Harlan Ellison’s 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions, included in the picture above), and the Brian Aldiss novel Barefoot in the Head (1969, also pictured above). The latter deals with the aftermath of the Acid Head War, in which the population of Europe is suffering the effects of Psychochemical Aerosol Bombs – making some chapters read like a kind of spaced-out sixties version of Finnegans Wake!

With one exception, all the books pictured above are my own copies bought in the 1970s. The exception is The Divine Invasion by Philip K. Dick, which wasn’t published until 1981. My copy is the first British paperback edition, which I bought as soon as it came out in March 1982 (sadly, in the few days between buying the book and reading it, I heard the news that Dick had died of a stroke at the age of 53).

Finnegans Wake is referred to in the very first chapter of The Divine Invasion. The protagonist, Herb Asher, interprets Joyce’s word “talktape” (in the line “tuck up your sleeves and loosen your talktapes”) to mean “magnetic audio tape” – the invention of which, he believes, postdates the writing of the novel. That isn’t actually true (and from the context it doesn’t sound like Joyce was thinking about a recording device anyway)... but that doesn’t stop Asher launching into some characteristically Dickian speculation:

It’s impossible that James Joyce could have mentioned talktapes in his writing, Asher thought. Some day I’m going to get my article published; I’m going to prove that Finnegans Wake is an information pool based on computer memory systems that didn’t exist until a century after James Joyce’s era; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousness from which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpus of work.

At another point Dick says “He also has them sitting around a TV set” – and in this case he’s absolutely correct: television plays an important role in Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s portrayal of TV is quite prescient – not in terms of the technology, which already existed when the novel was written, but in terms of its social acceptance. When Dick says “them” he means the customers in a Dublin pub... and pub televisions were still a thing of the future in 1939. So Finnegans Wake was almost certainly the first mainstream novel to portray TV as a commonplace rather than a newfangled novelty.

Joyce made up so many new words in Finnegans Wake you can find almost anything you look for in there. As an example – after a bit of googling (for googling) I found “Feastking of shellies by googling Lovvey” and “One chap googling the holyboy’s thingabib”!

The Lafferty Paradox

Ever heard of Raphael Aloysius Lafferty? Not many people have, despite the fact that he was one of the most intelligent and prolific writers of Fortean fiction in the 1960s and 70s. That’s one of the lesser paradoxes surrounding R.A. Lafferty. Another is the fact that, around the time I started reading science fiction in the early seventies, he was one of the most ubiquitous contributors to magazines and anthologies – often appearing on the cover and being nominated for numerous awards – yet even in those days publishers were strangely reluctant to put out single-author works by Lafferty, in the form of novels and short-story collections (here in the UK, they were only ever issued as hardbacks for the library market). The 1984 paperback collection pictured above, Ringing Changes, proved incredibly difficult to track down – I eventually acquired it from an online US-based seller a couple of weeks ago.

The biggest Lafferty paradox, however, is in the stories themselves. Most of them are very short, and at first sight they appear to be whimsical, offbeat fantasies that can read quickly and forgotten quickly. His characters are often bizarrely cartoonish, with bizarre cartoonish names. His settings are surreal and his plots are outrageous. His writing style is chatty and filled with laugh-out-loud humour. This all goes to support the view that Lafferty’s stories are lightweight and ephemeral. But nothing could be further from the truth – which is that Lafferty was one of the most serious, deep-thinking writers of his generation. Almost all his stories have a carefully thought-through philosophical subtext, often on issues he felt strongly about.

When you think about deep-thinking SF writers of the 60s and 70s, the name that springs most obviously to mind is Philip K. Dick. Probably every SF fan in the world has heard of him, and academics write dissertations about his work. So why isn’t the same true of R. A. Lafferty?

One difference is in the medium they chose. Most of Dick’s important works are 70,000 word novels, while Lafferty’s tend to be 5,000 word short stories – a form whose popularity has plummeted since the 1970s. But a bigger difference is in the accessibility of their ideas. Dick’s idée fixe was essentially Gnostic – that the so-called “reality” we perceive around us is in some sense fake or substandard. That resonates perfectly with the uncertainty and paranoia of the modern world, and most readers can relate to it. There’s something screwy about reality in Lafferty’s stories too – but in a far more complex way, which even a Lafferty fan like myself often has difficulty getting to grips with.

In Wild Talents, Charles Fort wrote: “I conceive of nothing in religion, science or philosophy that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while.” Does this mean that while reality itself is fixed and self-consistent, human attempts to understand it are constantly changing perspective over the generations? Or is it that reality itself is always shifting into new configurations? Lafferty seems to have believed the latter. His stories tell of times in the past – often the not-very-distant past – when the laws of physics were different, or human abilities were different, or animal species were different, or time itself was different. But the differences quickly get forgotten, because history reshapes itself to cover up the changes.

By my count, more than half the 20 stories in the Ringing Changes collection deal with one variation or another on this theme (the other stories deal with other, equally philosophical, ideas). I will get hopelessly muddled if I try to describe all of them, so I’ll just focus on the two most obviously Fortean stories.

The longest story in the collection, “The Rivers of Damascus”, is one of half a dozen that I’d already read (in this case, in the issue of Galaxy magazine in which it first appeared). Longest is a relative term, though – it’s still only 27 pages, although it could easily have been expanded into a novel ten times that length. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the original plan, since the story reads like the outline of a novel in places. For example, the backstories of the two main characters go into far more biographical detail than you would expect in a novelette of this length. One of them is a skilled dowser, who is capable of dowsing not just underground water but the past as well (this is explained with some first-rate technobabble about the heterodyning of brain waves – Lafferty was an electrical engineer by profession).

The other character has a psychic talent of a different kind – he can tune into mental impressions and turn them into solid reality. So between them, acting as a team, they can help academic researchers recreate the past in the form of a “para-archaeological probe”. But this is a Lafferty story, so it’s the wrong underground river they tap into... and the past thus revealed is completely different from the one in the history books. They become a laughing-stock of the scientific establishment, paraded before a billion-strong TV audience on an ultra-skeptical documentary show called “Science Supreme, the End of the Crackpots”. But the story has a happy ending – the entrenched academics are revealed as the true crackpots, while the world gives the para-archaeologists an open-door welcome!

The collection includes three stories that hadn’t previously seen print. One of them is burdened with the rather longwinded title “Oh Whatta You Do When the Well Runs Dry?” (I guess that’s what happens when an author makes up his own title, without editorial intervention). It’s an excellent story, though. It features the same protagonist, Miss Phosphor McCabe, as “Nor Limestone Islands” which I mentioned in Charles Fort in Fiction. This story isn’t a direct sequel, but it’s equally Fortean and it has a stronger philosophical subtext.

The “well” of the title is the Collective Unconscious – a concept taken from Jungian psychology, though given a Lafferty-esque twist. This is the place people get their ideas and creative inspirations from, and one day it suddenly runs dry. Or does it? A group of Forteans knows better. They know the Collective Unconscious consists of countless sub-wells, and what has run dry is just the conventional-thinking one. There are plenty of others to choose from – but only if everyone in the world becomes as open-minded as the Forteans! Again, the story has a happy ending:

You know what rough and shouting people the Forteans had always been? You remember what rude strutters the Boschites were? You know the loud and glittering insanity of the Dalikites, and the perversity and perfidy of the Albionians? These shabby, crude, delirious dregs of humanity had always lived on rocks in the lower skies and in shanties on the outskirts of our towns. But now we all drank their water, we thought their thoughts (thoughts? some of their ghouly notions were enough to rot the flesh off your bones), and now we became indistinguishable from them.

The Museum of the Future

The Museum of the Future is a new collection of 20 short stories, published by Jon Downes at CFZ Press under the “Fortean Fiction” imprint. I included the blurb in my Books, plural post last month, but here it is again:

Twenty tales of High Strangeness featuring conspiracy theorists, mad scientists, hippies, geeks and miscellaneous weirdos: A group of Cambridge academics investigate a crashed UFO... An outcast scientist discovers the secret of anti-gravity... A paranormal author finds himself prime suspect in the Case of the Purloined Poe... A student has a bewildering vision of the future... Four New Agers are regressed back to their past lives... An engineer invents a new way to spy on the competition... A viewer gets too deeply involved in a TV cop show... A young woman battles the spies, aliens and perverts that only she can see... and a dozen more stories!

Most of the stories were written because I was looking for an entertaining way of getting a particular idea across. As a result there’s quite a mix of styles and genres. There’s some science fiction, some adventure, some mystery and some horror. At least half the stories have a humorous element to them, and several are parodies of a specific style. I guess if I had to stick a label on the collection it would be “Fortean satire”.

There’s an account of the Rennes-le-Chateau mystery in the style of an M. R. James ghost story, and of the Rendlesham UFO incident in the style of a pulp adventure. There’s Roswell-style paranoia, transplanted backward in time from the Cold War to the period just before the First World War. There’s H. P. Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu” retold in the style of Philip K. Dick. And there’s a murder mystery featuring homeopathy, Tesla coils and other internet-age wackiness.

The title story, “Museum of the Future”, is very short – but it’s retold five times. It’s a vision of the British Museum in the year 2012, as envisaged in 1912, 1932, 1952, 1972 and 1992. The basic plot is pretty much the same, but the background details are different every time. Not surprisingly, these reflect the political preoccupations of the time the story was written!

The Museum of the Future is published as a paperback (ISBN 978-1-909488-23-6), which I believe can be ordered from “all good bookshops” or via any of the Amazon sites. It’s also available as an ebook, but only in Kindle format (so my apologies to regular reader Colin and anyone else who may buy their ebooks elsewhere). Here are a few links:

• Amazon US – paperback
• Amazon UK – paperback
• Amazon US – Kindle
• Amazon UK – Kindle

Retro-Fortean Answers

Here are the answers to last week’s Retro-Fortean Crossword. Wherever possible the clues were based on previous blog posts – in which case I’ve included a link to the relevant post.

ACROSS

1. AMBROSE Bierce, who vanished without a trace in December 1913 (See The Ambrose Collector)

5. Generic term for a mystery animal: CRYPTID (As in the Cryptid Casebook series – see The Science of Bigfoot for my contribution to the series)

9. Nickname of Raymond A. Palmer, pulp magazine editor who popularized the Shaver Mystery: RAP (My copy of the special “Shaver Mystery” issue of Amazing Stories, dated June 1947, can be seen in the photograph above)

10. “The EERIEST Ruined Dawn World”, short story by Fritz Leiber

11. Secretive organization that Edward Snowden used to work for: NSA (As featured in Satire and the Internet)

12. Fictional country which is the source of Doc Savage’s wealth: HIDALGO (The Doc Savage trade paperback pictured above includes a comic-book adaptation of Doc’s origin story, set in Hidalgo)

13. “POST HOC ergo propter hoc”, a logical fallacy popular with some conspiracy theorists

14. A short 16 mm film clip from 1967 purportedly showing Bigfoot: PATTERSON-GIMLIN (See Patterson-Gimlin Film Fake or Fact)

19. Village in the South of France reputedly associated with a great mystical secret: RENNES-LE-CHATEAU (See The Devil of Rennes-le-Chateau)

21. Ankh, cross and pentagram, for example: SYMBOLS

24. A Runic alphabet: FUTHARK

27. LEN Wein, creator of Wolverine and Swamp Thing (My copy of Wolverine’s first appearance was featured in The Marvel Age of Comics)

28. Hard to pin down, like many Fortean phenomena: ELUSIVE

29. Like a UFO, but not unidentified: IFO

30. An unexplained event: ANOMALY

31. SHANNON McMahon, X-Files super-soldier played by Lucy Lawless

DOWN

1. Early type of UFO widely reported across America during the 1890s: AIRSHIP

2. Bigfoot, for example: BIPED

3. Denny O’NEIL, author of The Shadow 1941: Hitler’s Astrologer (See Hitler’s Astrologer)

4. If the Gunpowder Plot was a False Flag operation, this person may have engineered it: EARL OF SALISBURY (As described in my Conspiracy History book)

5. A famous Fortean mystery from Barbados: CREEPING COFFINS (See Creeping Coffins)

6. Himalayan giant apes (real or imaginary): YETIS

7. Enigmatic alien creature in Philip K. Dick’s novel A Maze of Death: TENCH (My copy, which I originally read in 1980, is pictured above)

8. A type of scientific analysis applied to Bigfoot and Richard III: DNA SCAN (See Bigfoot, Richard III and Outsider Science)

15. The TEN Lost Tribes of Israel

16. The Third EYE, by T. Lobsang Rampa

17. IRA Levin, author of Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives

18. First name of JFK’s alleged assassin: LEE

19. A water nymph in Slavic mythology RUSALKA (As mentioned in my novelette The Mechanical Gorilla)

20. Pulp magazine which featured Eric Frank Russell’s Sinister Barrier in its first issue: UNKNOWN (See Sinister Barrier: the first Fortean novel and Pulp Forteana)

22. Planet ruled by Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon’s universe: MONGO

23. The Magic Flute or The Flying Dutchman, for example: OPERA (See Fortean Opera)

25. Huge volcanic eruption which may have been responsible for the Atlantis legend: THERA

26. Entity from another planet: ALIEN

Retro-Fortean Crossword

I thought I’d do another crossword puzzle this Christmas, since last year’s seemed to go down well. I assume it went down well, anyway, because it got an above-average number of page-views... but then the annotated list of answers the following week got below-average views, so maybe people just took one look at the puzzle and decided not to bother with it!

As before it’s an old-fashioned non-interactive crossword, so you’ll have to print it out or do it in your head. I originally wanted all the clues to refer to something I’ve written about on this blog in the last 12 months, but once I started filling letters in I realized that wasn’t going to be possible. Still, I’ve tried to stay on-topic as far as possible. I’ll print the answers (together with an explanation of the Retro-Fortean connections) next week.

ACROSS

1. ------- Bierce, who vanished without a trace in December 1913 [7]
5. Generic term for a mystery animal [7]
9. Nickname of Raymond A. Palmer, pulp magazine editor who popularized the Shaver Mystery [3]
10. “The ------- Ruined Dawn World”, short story by Fritz Leiber [7]
11. Secretive organization that Edward Snowden used to work for [3]
12. Fictional country which is the source of Doc Savage’s wealth [7]
13. “---- --- ergo propter hoc”, a logical fallacy popular with some conspiracy theorists [4, 3]
14. A short 16 mm film clip from 1967 purportedly showing Bigfoot [9-6]
19. Village in the South of France reputedly associated with a great mystical secret [6-2-7]
21. Ankh, cross and pentagram, for example [7]
24. A Runic alphabet [7]
27. --- Wein, creator of Wolverine and Swamp Thing [3]
28. Hard to pin down, like many Fortean phenomena [7]
29. Like a UFO, but not unidentified [3]
30. An unexplained event [7]
31. ------- McMahon, X-Files super-soldier played by Lucy Lawless [7]

DOWN

1. Early type of UFO widely reported across America during the 1890s [7]
2. Bigfoot, for example [5]
3. Denny -----, author of The Shadow 1941: Hitler’s Astrologer [5]
4. If the Gunpowder Plot was a False Flag operation, this person may have engineered it [4, 2, 9]
5. A famous Fortean mystery from Barbados [8, 7]
6. Himalayan giant apes (real or imaginary) [5]
7. Enigmatic alien creature in Philip K. Dick’s novel A Maze of Death [5]
8. A type of scientific analysis applied to Bigfoot and Richard III [3, 4]
15. The --- Lost Tribes of Israel [3]
16. The Third ---, by T. Lobsang Rampa [3]
17. --- Levin, author of Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives [3]
18. First name of JFK’s alleged assassin [3]
19. A water nymph in Slavic mythology [7]
20. Pulp magazine which featured Eric Frank Russell’s Sinister Barrier in its first issue [7]
22. Planet ruled by Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon’s universe [5]
23. The Magic Flute or The Flying Dutchman, for example [5]
25. Huge volcanic eruption which may have been responsible for the Atlantis legend [5]
26. Entity from another planet [5]

The Ambrose Collector

Just over a century ago, the American author Ambrose Bierce disappeared in war-torn Mexico. On December 26 1913 he wrote “I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination” – and he was never seen or heard from again. The case remains one of the classic unsolved mysteries, and there are dozens of conflicting theories as to his fate. A recent article describes several eyewitness accounts of his death, all in different places at different times.

There are much weirder theories, too. Many years earlier, Bierce wrote an odd little story called “The Difficulty of Crossing a Field”, about a man who starts to walk across a field – and suddenly vanishes into thin air. This has led some people (and by “some people”, I mean the makers of Ancient Aliens) to speculate that Bierce stumbled across a secret portal to another dimension... which he described in veiled terms in the story, before eventually passing through it himself.

Not surprisingly, Charles Fort was interested in the case of Ambrose Bierce. He wrote about it in Lo!, and again in Wild Talents. In the latter book he linked the story to another disappearance – that of Ambrose Small in Canada in 1919. The problem that fascinated Fort was “what the disappearance of one Ambrose could have to do with the disappearance of another Ambrose”. This led to a characteristically Fortean speculation: “Was somebody collecting Ambroses?”

The bizarre notion of an Ambrose Collector crops up in a novel I read several years ago, and then forgot all about until I was reading about the Bierce case recently. The book in question is Compliments of a Fiend by Fredric Brown, who is best known for the numerous science fiction stories he wrote in the 1940s and 50s. Some of the best of these, such as his novel What Mad Universe, foreshadow the work of Philip K. Dick in their portrayal of counterfeit, mind-created worlds. I mentioned Fredric Brown in just this context earlier this month, in my post about Mad Scientists, Zombies and the Loch Ness Monster.

But Compliments of a Fiend (1950) isn’t science fiction. Fredric Brown was an equally prolific writer of crime novels, and several of them feature a young detective named Ed Hunter and his uncle Ambrose. With a name like that, it was only a matter of time before the pair came up against the Ambrose Collector!

The novel isn’t especially Fortean, and it makes no attempt to explain the disappearance of either Ambrose Bierce or Ambrose Small. But it does have a villain who uses the pseudonym of “the Ambrose Collector”, and the corresponding quote from Wild Talents is referred to several times in the course of the plot. I read Compliments of a Fiend because it was recommended to me by someone who is a big fan of Fredric Brown, so I know at least some people think it’s a great book. As I mentioned earlier, however, personally I found the novel rather forgettable – although it’s a decent enough mystery story, and definitely one for Fortean completists.

Post-Fortean Meta-Complexity

This is yet another nostalgic post about something that no longer exists – although in this case it only ceased to exist last week.

I originally set up my website www.andrew-may.com in 2001, long before blogs and social media took off. In those days, a personal presence on the web took the form of a “home page”. These were often very opinionated and idiosyncratic – or mine was, at least. I realized some time ago, soon after I started this blog, that online fashions have changed. A blog is a good place to be opinionated and idiosyncratic, but a personal website – for people who still need one – ought to be slicker and more professional-looking.

I put off making the change as long as I could, but last week I was migrated from my old Windows server to a new Linux host, so I took the opportunity to do a complete overhaul. Hopefully the new site looks more serious and less cranky than the old one. Essentially it’s just an online bibliography now, although there are some links to older stuff in the small print at the bottom.

One of the things I’ve ditched is the name of the old site, “Post-Fortean Meta-Complexity”. This was meant to be a pastiche of the numerous postmodern academic disciplines that were trendy at the time. I thought it was a really good title (and I still do), but it sounds rather dated now. The name wasn’t just random – it actually meant something. If “Fortean” means taking a non-judgmental interest in offbeat facts and occurrences, then “Post-Fortean” applies the same approach to offbeat theories and ideas!

With the help of the Wayback Machine, I had a look back at some of the earliest versions of the website. The screenshot above isn’t from the very first version, but it was the first version that looked the way I wanted it to.

Some of the early content is still there on the website if you dig deep enough. Down at the bottom of the current site there’s a link that says “Archive” (there are also links to two other old sites of mine, Zen Dynamics and Astounding Science Fiction). Most of the early stuff is about Buddhism and Philip K. Dick, for some reason. There’s an interesting list of Metaphysical Quotations from the novels of Philip K Dick that I’d forgotten all about. There’s also an article that touches on the connections between PKD, the Buddha and Richard Wagner!

I had a few problems with case-sensitive filenames and encoding errors (apostrophes and hyphens not rendering correctly) when I moved to the Linux server. I think I’ve cleared these up now, but let me know if you encounter any problems with the new site.

Crossword Exegesis

I don’t really know what an exegesis is, but people expect a crossword compiler to have a big vocabulary. What I mean is, on the other side of the following image are the answers to last week’s crossword and/or trivia quiz, together with an explanation of the various Fortean connections.

If you want to do the puzzle but haven’t done so yet, reading beyond this point will take you into spoiler territory. But if you’ve done the puzzle, or just want to see the answers, scroll on...

ACROSS

1. Author of Chariots of the Gods: ERICH VON DANIKEN. An easy one to start with! But EvD’s ideas weren’t as original as many people imagine – see Reinventing Ezekiel's Wheel.

9. First of the seven churches mentioned in the Book of Revelation: EPHESUS. A Turkish town and a major centre of early Christianity. It was also the site of one of the Seven Wonders of the World: the Temple of Artemis.

10. “Their weapons were no match for the Bossonian LONGBOW" (Robert E. Howard). This comes from the only full-length Conan novel that Howard wrote, The Hour of the Dragon (also sometimes published as Conan the Conqueror). Not a particularly Fortean story, although some of Howard’s other fiction is. I think I’ll make that the subject of my next blog post.

11. "Voyagers who have shown every indication of intent to EVADE " (Charles Fort). This comes from The Book of the Damned, a few paragraphs after the oft quoted “I think we're property” – the voyagers in question being extraterrestrial ones.

12. Yggdrasil, for example: ASH. Yggdrasil is the World Ash Tree in Norse mythology.

13. The world ends without this, according to T.S. Eliot: A BANG. From The Hollow Men (1925): “This is the way the world ends: Not with a bang but a whimper.” Another Eliot poem from the same period, The Waste Land, is packed with Fortean themes – I’ll have to add that to my list of future posts as well.

14. Site of the Crucifixion: CALVARY. From the Latin Calvariæ Locus = “place of the skull”. The Hebrew equivalent is Golgotha.

16. "I had long hoped for a personal CONTACT with a man from a flying saucer" (George Adamski). A quote from Flying Saucers have Landed, co-authored with the far more interesting Desmond Leslie.

18. The queen of the fairies, according to Shakespeare: TITANIA. From A Midsummer Might’s Dream, of course. The picture (fourth image on top row) shows a detail from The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania (1847) by Sir Joseph Noel Paton.

21. Sayings of Jesus that are not found in the Gospels: AGRAPHA. This is an obscure one, but anyone who’s tried compiling a crossword will know that the more words you fill in, the harder it gets to find unobscure words to fit the remaining spaces! But Agrapha isn’t so obscure that it doesn’t have its own Wikipedia page.

23. Max ERNST, German surrealist. Perhaps the most Fortean connection here is Ernst’s bird-man creation called Loplop, which was adopted as a kind of mascot by Jon Downes and the Centre for Fortean Zoology (see picture – third image on the top row).

25. URI Geller, Israeli-born psychic. Geller’s 1973 appearance on the Dimbleby Talk-In was one of my Fortean Events that Shook the World.

26. "Thus SPAKE Zarathustra", by Friedrich Nietzsche. Written in the 1880s, this philosophical work focused on two concepts more often associated with the 20th century: “The Superman” and “God is Dead”.

27. Lenape people living in New Jersey when the Europeans arrived: RARITAN. This is one of two grid entries where I just couldn’t find anything Fortean that would fit. There’s a modern-day city in New Jersey named Raritan, as well as Raritan Bay between New Jersey and New York.

28. "IMMORAL Tales" (1974), featuring Paloma Picasso as Countess Erzsébet Báthory. The Báthory segment focuses on the historical countess, not the later legends that associate her with vampirism. So she doesn’t slaughter large quantities of female virgins and bathe in their blood in order to restore her youth. She just slaughters large quantities of female virgins and bathes in their blood because she enjoys it (see picture – first image on bottom row).

29. Britain's best-known cryptid: LOCH NESS MONSTER. In light of the upcoming Scottish independence vote, perhaps I should have worded this as “Scotland's best-known cryptid” to stay on the safe side.

DOWN

1. The building pictured [in last week’s post]: EXETER CATHEDRAL. Another non-Fortean one – I needed a 15-letter word or phrase beginning with E and ending with L, and this was the best I could do. The answer was actually written on the image, if you can read Latin: Exoniensis Ecclesiae Cathedralis.

2. Eldest son of Abraham, according to the Book of Genesis: ISHMAEL. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, Ishmael is less important than his younger half-brother Isaac. In Islam, however, Ishmael is the more important of the two, being a direct ancestor of Muhammad.

3. Herman HESSE, author of Siddhartha. According to Wikipedia, this 1922 novel “deals with the spiritual journey of self-discovery of a man named Siddhartha during the time of the Gautama Buddha.... It was published in the U.S. in 1951 and became influential during the 1960s.”

4. The James OSSUARY is inscribed "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus". If the inscription is genuine, it might constitute archaeological evidence for the Biblical Jesus... but quoting Wikipedia again, “most scholars hold the last part of the inscription to be a forgery”.

5. The DELPHIC Sibyl, prophetess of Apollo. The illustration (second image on top row) is from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling.

6. Professional assassin in feudal Japan: NINJA. I’m not sure if this is an easy one or not – everyone uses the word “ninja”, but do they really know what it means?

7. An esoteric branch of Judaism: KABBALA. When I compiled the crossword a few years ago, I convinced myself this was a valid spelling – although “Kabbalah”, “Cabala” and “Qabbala” are more common.

8. A type of hippie found in 1980s Britain: NEW AGE TRAVELLER. Again the spelling may look wrong to some people, but that’s how it’s spelled here in Britain. And hey, spelling rules are just another fascist conspiracy anyhow. If you catch my drift, man.

15. ANN Greenslit Pudeator, hanged as a witch in Salem in 1692. It was tragic, of course, that so many innocent women were accused of witchcraft in the 17th century... but really, with a name like Ann Greenslit Pudeator, what do you expect? She probably had a pierced nasal septum and wore black lipstick, too.

17. "Alles Vergangliche ist NUR ein Gleichnis" (Everything transient is only a symbol - Goethe). These words are sung by the Chorus Mysticus at the end of Mahler’s 8th Symphony (see The Curse of the Ninth).

19. "The Serpent Power: Secrets of TANTRIC and Shaktic Yoga" by Arthur Avalon. The author’s real name was Sir John Woodroffe, who derived his pseudonym from Arthurian mythology. Oddly, though, the book isn’t about Arthurian mythology but about Indian mysticism. Woodroffe was one of the first proponents of the New Age formula “if it’s old, and it doesn’t come from the Judaeo-Christian or Graeco-Roman tradition, then it must be good.”

20. Thomas AQUINAS, author of "Summa Theologica". Aquinas was a 13th century scholar who specialized in interpreting the works of Aristotle (that’s what scholars used to do in those days, in lieu of thinking for themselves). He was often depicted trampling on a rival Aristotle-interpreter named Averroës, as seen in the painting by Gozzoli in the rightmost image above.

21. Belief that all living and non-living things have a spiritual essence: ANIMISM. Closely related to paranoia: the belief that all living and non-living things are out to get you.

22. Generic term for Indian languages related to Sanskrit: PRAKRIT. Most mystical and religious Indian writings are in Sanskrit, although the earliest Buddhist scriptures are in a Prakrit language called Pali. “Karma” and “Nirvana” are Sanskrit – the Pali equivalents are “Kamma” and “Nibbana”.

24. The largest moon of Saturn: TITAN. One of the few bodies in the Solar System that astrobiologists believe may support alien life – thought probably not as advanced as the alien life envisaged by Philip K. Dick in The Game-Players of Titan.

26. SIMON Magus, a sorcerer mentioned in the Book of Acts. All the Bible says about Simon is that he became a Christian, but not a very good one. However, later writers describe him as one of the founders of Gnosticism, and presumably for that reason he’s one of the many highbrow figures namedropped by Philip K. Dick in VALIS.

The Flying Dutchman in Comics

2013 is Wagner’s bicentennial year, and one of the more unusual celebrations I saw mentioned on the Wagnerian’s blog was The Flying Dutchman: The Comic Book. This reminded me of three other “Flying Dutchman” comics I’ve come across. I don’t mean adaptations of Wagner’s opera, but alternative takes on the Dutchman legend. Since these happen to be the work of some of my all-time favourite comic-book creators, this gives me a good excuse to indulge in another nostalgia session!

Rather than embed half a dozen images in the blog (and since I’ve been wanting to try out iMovie) I thought I’d make a short video instead... with a Wagnerian soundtrack, of course (Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer featured earlier this year in Fortean Opera).

Chronologically, the first of the three Dutchman adaptations appeared in issue #4 of Out of This World, published by Charlton Comics in June 1957. This was the work of Steve Ditko, who I’ve mentioned at least once before, in Giant from the Unknown. I first came across Ditko in reprints of early Spider-Man and Doctor Strange stories... and also (even more strikingly when I was 10 or 11) reprints of the short, quirky pieces he did for Marvel in the pre-superhero days. He also produced similar stories for Charlton comics, although I only became aware of these relatively recently when they came into the public domain – they can now be read online at http://comicbookplus.com/. That’s how I came across Ditko’s “Flying Dutchman”... although sadly it’s well below his best both in terms of storytelling and artwork.

A funny animal comic may seem an unlikely place to encounter the Flying Dutchman legend... but not when the funny animal in question is Scrooge McDuck. Created by Carl Barks, the Uncle Scrooge stories of the 1950s had less in common with Mickey Mouse than with Doc Savage – in terms of his globetrotting adventures, at least: “The Secret of Atlantis”, “The Fabulous Philosopher's Stone”, “The Lost Crown of Genghis Khan”, “The Mines of King Solomon” and dozens of others. “The Flying Dutchman” first appeared in March 1959, although I would have seen it in a British reprint circa 1964. I used to love the exotic adventure genre in those days... almost as much as I do today!

The idea of an elderly Scottish duck travelling around the world in search of adventure puts a modest strain on the imagination, but it’s nothing compared with the third and final comic on the list: The Silver Surfer. The idea of a silver-plated (but otherwise perfectly normal-looking) humanoid travelling through intergalactic space on a surfboard is – well, it’s downright silly, isn’t it? Not when you’re 11 years old, it isn’t – it’s just the totally coolest thing imaginable. Even more so when the artwork is by the incomparable John Buscema and the peerless prose is by none other than Stan Lee himself. In issue #8 (September 1969), the Surfer’s arch-nemesis Mephisto conjured up the ghost of the Flying Dutchman for the perfectly logical reason that he needed to steal the Surfer’s soul, and this was the simplest way to go about it.

After producing the video above, which is really just a fancy slideshow, I thought I’d try my hand at something more creative. Some time ago I wrote a post called Philip K. Dick, music critic, about a short story called “The Preserving Machine” in which various works of classical music are transformed into living creatures. Here is a video I’ve just put together on the same subject:

Satire and the Internet

Ed Snowden is one of the great heroes of our time. Or maybe he’s one of the great villains. But despite the range of views on the subject, few people doubt that the government secrets he’s released are indeed true. That’s if, like me, you get your facts from old-fashioned “reputable sources” like the BBC and the Guardian. But there’s a whole generation now who get their news from Facebook shares and similar social media. And for them, Ed Snowden is one of the great clowns of our time.

On 5 July, Snowden revealed the truth about UFOs: “There is a species more intelligent than homo sapiens living in the mantle of the Earth. It makes sense, if you think about it, because that is the only place where conditions have been more or less stable for billions of years... The president receives daily briefings about their activities. Analysts believe their technology to be so far advanced that we stand little chance of survival in any potential war. The general sentiment is that we are but ants from their perspective.”

On 10 July, Snowden “released documents... proving that the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP, is definitively engaged in a program of assassination and mind control.” The following day, 11 July, Snowden uncovered “the shocking truth behind Chemtrails” (HAARP and Chemtrails have been mainstays of hardcore conspiracy theory for the last two decades, although they’re not particularly well known to the public at large).

On 16 July Snowden revealed the existence of “a fleet of undercover prototype cars equipped with long-range neuroimaging sensors” that “carve carefully planned routes through urban and suburban centers, collecting detailed brain scans of sleeping citizens” in order to “determine whether your dreams indicate a subversive mindset”. This may sound like something out of a novel by Philip K. Dick, but it’s pretty mild compared with “Snowden’s greatest leak” that came a few days earlier (12 July): “God, according to documents released by Snowden, is a mechanic living in Cuthbert Georgia who goes by the name of Wilbur Mercer... Snowden quickly determined that our universe exists inside of a video game system which is owned and used by Mr. Mercer.”

Wilbur Mercer, of course, is the name of a character in Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and the image of “Wilbur Mercer” accompanying the article is in fact a photograph of Dick himself. Although many people will have encountered these Ed Snowden stories via second or third order Facebook shares, they are all ultimately derived (as you can see from my links) from the Internet Chronicle – which is one of a number of popular websites devoted to satire.

Satire has been around since ancient times, and for most of its history people never had much trouble recognizing it for what it is. Partly this is a self-selection effect. The only people who would have been exposed to satire—which after all is essentially a branch of literature—would have been relatively sophisticated, educated individuals who knew what they were letting themselves in for. But the rise of the internet and social media has seen a sudden democratization of the written word. I suspect that many Facebook users don’t even have the word “satire” in their vocabulary, any more than other literary terms like “semicolon” or “metaphor”. Everyone understands what humour and fiction are, so there’s no problem with works of satire that obviously fall in one or both these categories. The trouble starts when you get on to the kind of deadpan satire in which the humorous content is subtle and the fiction is presented as fact.

The phenomenon actually goes back to before the days of the internet. Last year I did a post about Ronald Knox’s First Radio Hoax, way back in 1926. It seems clear to me that Knox never thought of his broadcast as a hoax at all, but as a piece of outrageous satire. He simply overestimated the intellectual sophistication of certain segments of the listening public (not to mention the media).

One of the newsfeeds I follow avidly is “New Urban Legends” from snopes.com. As they repeatedly emphasize, “no satire can be so obvious that someone won’t take it literally”. Scarcely a week goes by without some pretty far-fetched story being debunked with the information that (a) it originated on a website that specializes in satirical content, and (b) it was subsequently “circulated via social media, with many of those who encountered the item mistaking it for a genuine news article”.

The great majority of the satirical pieces that go viral on social media revolve around the perennially dull subject (for us non-Americans) of U.S. politics. That’s even true of the Ed Snowden stories mentioned above, despite their superficial veneer of coolness (e.g. UFOs). But I came across one notable exception a few days ago: “Bow Valley flooding exposes rotting carcass of a Sasquatch. Legendary Cryptid believed to be a surviving Gigantopithecus”. The article comes complete with a photograph and some quotes by credible-sounding experts. One of these is named as “Coren Lowman” – a play on “Loren Coleman” that will sound warning bells for cryptozoological insiders, but probably won’t register with the casual reader.

Sadly, the whole thing is spoiled by the disclaimer at the bottom of the piece: “The above article is SATIRE. This article is provided as humour and any article, image or photograph held out as news is satirical and faux in nature and does not reflect the actions, statements or event of real persons.” Even so, I saw the item linked as “real news” a couple of times on Facebook. Perhaps the most worrying thing about the article is that it actually sounds more credible—with a better understanding of zoology and natural history—than most of the Bigfoot-related news items I’ve seen on the web this year!

Precog Fiction

A few days ago I wrote a review of Richard Thomas’s fascinating new book Para News for Fortean Times. I won’t pre-empt the review here, except to say the book is excellent value – you don’t just get Richard’s own views, but (by way of interviews) those of more than twenty key players in the world of parapolitics and the paranormal. If you’re interested in conspiracy theories, or in the overlap between conspiracy theories and ufology and other paranormal beliefs, or in the overlap between science fiction and any of the above, then you’ll find plenty of thought-provoking stuff in Para-News.

It was the last of these—overlaps between fringe beliefs and science fiction—that particularly set me to thinking. The basic idea is that certain themes of present-day conspiracy subculture are foreshadowed in earlier works of fiction, whether on screen or in print. The book refers to this as “Precog Fiction” – a term I’d never come across before, although I did do a blog post entitled Precogging Philip K. Dick. But that was about the foreshadowing of some of Dick’s fictional themes in earlier fiction. What about the foreshadowing of “non-fictional” themes in fiction?

Philip K. Dick himself is one of the most obvious examples of this. He may not have invented paranoia, but he certainly raised it to a fine art. Most of his novels, in one way or another, contain pre-echoes of the kind of conspiracy thinking you can find all over the internet these days. One of my favourites is The Penultimate Truth. This 1964 novel has the bulk of the world’s population living in underground squalor, led by the government to believe the surface of the planet is dangerously uninhabitable due to nuclear war. In reality, the surface is an idyllic paradise populated by the top-ranking elite. The details may be different, but the basic themes are the same. The government lies to its people, and keeps them exactly where it wants them through stage-managed wars and rumours of wars.

Everyone has heard of Philip K. Dick. Less well known is the author I’ve described as a British Philip K. Dick – John Brunner. One of the most chilling pieces of conspiracy fiction I’ve ever come across is a short story he wrote in 1974 called “The Protocols of the Elders of Britain”. This is how I described the story in Cold War Collaboration: “A computer engineer succeeds in decrypting an archive of Top Secret messages sent between the British government and its counterparts all over the world – not just friendly countries, but so-called enemies as well. It turns out they are all conspiring together to make the world a volatile and unstable place...” Not many people believed such things in 1974, but thousands do today.

A common theme in conspiracy theory is the idea that headline-making disasters are the result not of chance, but of the machinations of a small, super-powerful elite that works from the shadows. While such ideas have widespread currency today, they were almost unknown in 1948 when Eric Frank Russell’s novel Dreadful Sanctuary was serialized in Astounding Science Fiction magazine. The plot was years ahead of its time. It starts with attempts to launch rockets into space, which was common enough in the science fiction of the 1940s. But, for one reason or another, the space flights all end in disaster. It emerges they are being sabotaged by a small but powerful secret society, that believes it knows a dangerous truth about the extraterrestrial origins of humanity. The members of the society believe they are the only truly sane people on the planet, and that everyone else is suffering from a mass delusion. But are they right, or are they the ones that are delusional? The uncertainty is maintained throughout the novel in a style worthy of Philip K. Dick himself.

The term “science fiction” only came into widespread usage in the 1930s, at which time—as the name suggests—it was mainly concerned with futuristic developments in science and technology (cf. Futuristic Gadgets of the 1930s). Before then, much of what is retrospectively described as science fiction was preoccupied with the future direction of society, and had little interest in technology. As we now know, however, technology is one of the major drivers of social change – a fact that was only occasionally foreseen by earlier writers. I’ve already mentioned a couple of examples: The End of Books, with its 1895 pre-echo of iPods on the Paris metro, and The Machine Stops, with its 1909 vision of technology-facilitated social networking (see Wikipedia Prophecy).

In a similar vein, but more relevant to the world of parapolitics, is Rudyard Kipling’s short story As Easy as ABC. This was first published in 1912, although it has the still-futuristic setting of 2065. At first glance, the story could be dismissed as hopelessly outdated – the ABC of the title is the Aerial Board of Control, and the core technology of the story consists of huge dirigible airships. But the specifics of the technology aren’t as important as its role in society – to provide a single planet-wide communications infrastructure. Nowadays, we would see that as being the internet rather than a transportation network. But Kipling’s basic point is still chillingly valid – that the entrepreneurs who control the technological infrastructure are the true rulers of the world, and technology increasingly renders traditional democracy obsolete and impotent.

Early on in the story, there is a striking scene in which the protagonists, approaching a young woman sitting on a veranda, find themselves caught in an electric force field. “We heard the click of a switch, and almost fell forward as the currents round our knees were withdrawn. The girl laughed, and laid aside her knitting. An old-fashioned controller stood at her elbow, which she reversed from time to time, and we could hear the snort and clank of the obedient cultivator half a mile away... ‘Come in and sit down,’ she said. ‘I’m only playing a plough’.”

This is interesting both from the technological point of view (a mechanically operated plough would have been a novelty in 1912, let alone a remotely controlled one) and the social point of view (a middle-class young woman in charge of heavy farm machinery). But perhaps most striking is the descriptive term itself – “playing a plough”. This must surely be the first example in history of what nowadays would be referred to as “gamification of the user interface”!

The above are just a few thoughts that sprang to mind when I came across the phrase “Precog Fiction” – you can find many other fascinating examples in Richard’s book Para-News. Two of his examples actually relate to works I’ve mentioned recently in this blog (The Devil Rides Out from Phascinating Phacts and Quatermass and the Pit from Cosmic Relics)... although the specific “Precog” aspects hadn’t occurred to me before Richard pointed them out.

Fortean Opera

I recently came across this gothically surreal image, which illustrates an early 19th century opera called Der Freischütz. Reading up about this, it turns out to be quite a Fortean opera, which started me thinking. A Google search for “Fortean opera” turns up nothing of relevance, so I decided it was time to rectify the situation. Two or three titles sprang to mind, in addition to Der Freischütz, and some further research turned up a few others. In the end I came up with the following list (in chronological order of composition):

Il Mondo della Luna (The World of the Moon) by Haydn (1777). As the title suggests, this opera features a trip to the Moon and an encounter with its inhabitants. That wouldn’t be particularly Fortean... except that the “aliens” are fakes and the journey to the Moon is all a big hoax. As such, Il Mondo della Luna is probably the first opera ever written about a fake Moon landing – all the way back in 1777! It isn’t a well-known work (Haydn is more famous for his symphonies than his operas), but I found this clip on YouTube from a recent performance in New York. It looks quite jolly!

Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) by Mozart (1791). This is a famously nutty opera that turns fairy tale conventions on their head. It begins with the hero, Prince Tamino, running away from a giant snake and fainting with fright. He is saved by three young women, followers of the Queen of the Night, who give him a magic flute and a mission to rescue the Queen’s daughter Pamina from a man named Sarastro. And why is this Fortean? Because it’s all a lie! When Tamino eventually catches up with Sarastro, it turns out he isn’t a villain at all, but a wise priest of Isis and Osiris (I should have mentioned this takes place in ancient Egypt). It’s true that Sarastro abducted Pamina, but only to free her from her mother’s clutches. He was keeping her safe so she could marry Tamino... but only after the latter has proved himself worthy by undergoing an arcane, Masonic-style initiation ritual. Strange as it may seem, he is assisted in this task by his magic flute, which was given to him by the evil Queen of the Night... who incidentally also steals the show.

Der Freischütz (The Freeshooter) by Weber (1821). This is a Pact with the Devil story.... the specific pact in this instance relating to the manufacture of magic bullets which always hit their target. The catch is that the seventh and last bullet does what the Devil—or rather the demon Samiel—wants it to... after which he takes your soul as per the standard agreement. The picture above illustrates the Wolf’s Glen scene, in which the magic bullets are forged while various spirits and demons look on. The whole scene is viewable on YouTube in two parts, here and here.

Der Fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) by Wagner (1843). The tale of the Flying Dutchman is a distinctly Fortean piece of folklore, about an old, ghostly ship that is occasionally glimpsed by sailors, its captain having been cursed to sail the seas forever. The original legend dates from the 17th century, but the opera turns it into a characteristically 19th century gothic romance. This is very early Wagner, and he went on to bigger and better things. It’s always struck me that, if the only thing that was known about Wagner was his operatic subject-matter, he would be considered an archetypal New Ager! You’ve got Celtic legends in Tristan und Isolde, the Holy Grail in Parsifal and paganism in the Ring – including this awesome invocation of the Earth Goddess!

La Nonne Sanglante (The Bleeding Nun) by Gounod (1854). Writing about Matthew Lewis’s novel The Monk (1796), H. P. Lovecraft wrote “In the sub-plot where the Marquis de las Cisternas meets the spectre of his erring ancestress, The Bleeding Nun, there are many enormously potent strokes; notably the visit of the animated corpse to the Marquis's bedside, and the cabalistic ritual whereby the Wandering Jew helps him to fathom and banish his dead tormentor.” This sounds like a great idea for an opera, but unfortunately Gounod’s attempt at it was a complete flop. Interestingly, the libretto was also offered to Gounod’s great contemporary Verdi, but he turned it down. If he hadn’t, The Bleeding Nun might have been up there with Rigoletto, Aida and La Traviata!

The Makropulos Case by Janáček (1926). I watched a production of this on a portable black and white TV when I was a student more than 30 years ago, and even then it occurred to me that it’s one of the few operas where the plot actually makes sense. The central character is a young woman named Emilia Marty, who takes an interest in a legal case that has been running for a century – and who talks about events of the 1820s as if she had been there. It gradually emerges that she’s lived for hundreds of years, using various different names all having the initials EM. But there’s an explanation for this which makes perfect sense. Anyone who is familiar with the story of John Dee and Edward Kelley will know that the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552 – 1612) was obsessed with alchemy and the search for eternal life. Rudolf was based in Prague, which is where The Makropulos Case is set (Janáček was a Czech composer). When an alchemist named Hieronymus Makropulos offered Rudolf a life-extending potion, the Emperor asked him to test it on the alchemist’s daughter, Elina Makropulos, first. This caused her to fall into a coma, and the Emperor changed his mind about using the potion... but when Elina woke up a week later she discovered she had stopped aging! Hence her survival into the 20th century.

Wagner Dream by Jonathan Harvey (2007). Richard Wagner died of a heart attack in February 1883, at the age of 69. But, according to this opera, he didn’t give up without a Tibetan Book of the Dead style struggle. He was just embarking on his last opera, Die Sieger, and he argues with his spirit guide Vairochana that he ought to be allowed to go back and finish it. Wagner Dream is an opera within an opera (Wagner’s opera Die Sieger, as imagined by Harvey, framed inside Harvey’s own opera about Wagner’s battle against death). Die Sieger is set in ancient India, where the Buddha is busy setting up his community of monks. The hero is a young monk named Ananda who is trying to persuade the Buddha to allow women to join the monastic order. But isn’t that a bit far-fetched? Wagner may have been into a few New Age beliefs like Paganism and Celtic mythology, but surely not Buddhism? And feminist Buddhism at that? But it’s all true. Back in the 1850s, Wagner really did write a synopsis of Die Sieger along exactly these lines, and he really did return to the idea shortly before his death. I was aware of that (it’s mentioned by Philip K. Dick in VALIS, and in turn I referred to it in my Worldcon talk about Parsifal as Proto-SF)... but I’ve only just found out about Wagner Dream. Now I’m kicking myself that I missed its London performance last year – although there is a short clip of an earlier Dutch production on YouTube.