Colin Wilson, Philosopher of the Paranormal

Back in the 1970s, Colin Wilson was one of the big names of what might be called "mass-market forteana". But while I did borrow a copy of his 600-page blockbuster The Occult circa 1978, it was only much later that I started to discover just how interesting his ideas are. It began in 2001, when I bought a book by Fortean Times contributor Gary Lachman called Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius (which I'm sure everyone spotted in my recent shelfie post, towards the right-hand end of the middle shelf). Colin Wilson made an appearance in Lachman's book in the context of the H. P. Lovecraft revival of the 1960s - including the wonderfully surreal cover of Wilson's 1967 novel The Mind Parasites. As evidenced by the photo above, I bought a second-hand copy as soon as I could find one, as well as two later novels in the same vein, The Philosopher's Stone (1969) and The Space Vampires (1976).

The other paperback shown above is a non-fiction one, The Psychic Detectives (1984), which I bought in 2016 when I was researching my own book, Pseudoscience and Science Fiction. Here's what I said about Wilson there:

As his career progressed, he became increasingly fascinated with the world of strange powers. A recurrent theme throughout his fiction and non-fiction is that most people live a robotic existence far below their real potential.

That use of the word "robotic" brings me on to the main subject of this post, which is the Kindle book shown in the above photo - Gary Lachman's Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson (2016). I only became aware of it last month, when Gary posted the following on Facebook:

I've just heard that the paperback of Beyond the Robot, my book about Colin Wilson, is now out of print. If you are among the many who didn't buy a copy, there's still time to not get the Kindle edition too.

Since I'm a chronic sufferer from the "Why do friends never read my books?" syndrome, I clearly had to buy it immediately! I'm glad I did, as I found it a fascinating and information-packed read which got 5 out of 5 stars from me on Goodreads. However, this post isn't really a review of the book, so much as a summary of a few things I found particularly interesting from a fortean point of view.

To start with, Fortean Times (as well as some of the "Unconventions" they organized) makes several appearances in the book. At one point Lachman specifically mentions "writing pretty regularly for the Fortean Times", and after Colin Wilson's death in 2013 Gary's obituary of him appeared in FT 310 (the same issue as my review of a comic-strip book about particle physics, FWIW). Although I've never actually met Gary, I did spot him at a couple of Uncons - and, I think, in the audience at the "Aliens and the Imagination" event I mentioned on this blog in 2011. Way back in 1978, in the guise of his musical alter-ego Gary Valentine, Lachman also wrote Blondie's paranormal-themed hit "I’m Always Touched by Your Presence, Dear".

As for Colin Wilson himself, he only came on to fortean-type subjects a decade or so after he started writing. His original focus was on existential philosophy, and his first book on that subject, The Outsider, was published in 1956 when he was just 24. It received a lot of rave reviews, including one in The Observer - which Lachman describes as one of Britain's "highbrow Sunday papers" (which pleased me a lot, since they published a two-page feature by me just a couple of months ago).

In hindsight, it's not surprising that Wilson's own personal take on philosophy eventually led to an interest in the paranormal, since it's ultimately all about widening human consciousness beyond the normal trivialities of everyday life. That's why he was drawn to the Lovecraftian style of fiction - he had no time for the more mainstream kind of novelist "who, in the service of realism, simply portrays life as it is". Another fortean favourite who made an impression on Wilson was Aleister Crowley. According to Lachman, Crowley was the model for one of the characters in Wilson's early novel Man Without a Shadow (1963) - Carradoc Cunningham, an occultist and master of "sex magic". Apparently Wilson himself harboured interests along the latter lines, believing that sexual orgasm can unlock higher states of consciousness and "open the doors of perception".

When Wilson came to write about the paranormal - The Occult (1971) being his first and best-known, but far from only, book on the subject - he did so in a way that was almost diametrically opposed to the standard approach for the genre. As Lachman puts it:

If scientists and other skeptics were ever going to broaden their minds about the occult, then it had to be presented to them logically, in a way that made sense, not in a sensational "believe it or not" manner.

As with his first book about philosophy, Wilson's first book on the paranormal also got rave reviews. In part, this was because "highbrow" readers were far more open to such topics at that time than they are today. Referring to a favourable review that New Scientist gave of Wilson's follow-up book Mysteries (1978), Lachman says:

Such acclaim from a scientific publication for a book about the paranormal is unusual today, and shows that in the 1970s, the paranormal was treated with respect by many scientists, unlike in our more narrowly skeptical times.

Another thing I remember myself from those times, is that interest in fringe topics was much more wide-ranging and eclectic than it is today. The "paranormal", for example, meant a lot more than just ghosts and poltergeists. Listing some of the topics that Wilson covered in Mysteries, Lachman includes "plant telepathy, psychic surgery, transcendental meditation, biofeedback, Kirlian photography, multiple personality and synchronicity". All great stuff - makes me feel more nostalgic than ever for the 20th century!

Colin Wilson was an incredibly prolific author, and I kept noting down titles of books of his that I ought to seek out. The most intriguing-sounding of all is Atlantis and the Kingdom of the Neanderthals (2006) - something I should have known about already, as Wilson mentioned it in an article he himself wrote for Fortean Times, called "A 100,000-year-old Civilization?" It appeared in FT 272 in March 2011, and I have to admit I'd forgotten all about it (although I looked back at it just now, which is how I know it mentions the Atlantis book). In any case, I've already acquired my copy of Atlantis and the Kingdom of the Neanderthals from eBay, as you can see here:

Fortean shelfies

 

Following on from last week's instalment What does fortean mean? I thought I'd post a couple of "shelfies" featuring books that fit my wider definition of the word. The one above contains newer books (what I think of as "newer" anyway, i.e. post-1990), while the one below shows books I've acquired second-hand - some of them genuine "retro-forteana" dating back to the 1950s or even earlier.

Although these are what I think of as my "fortean" books, they don't include everything I own that might fit the definition. For example, I've amassed a vast collection of fiction, much of which (as pointed out in the previous post) could easily be considered fortean. I also have numerous science books (many of them acquired as review copies for Fortean Times, or as research for my own writing) which are "fringy" enough to class as borderline forteana. But just two of them managed to squeeze into the picture above, both by my colleague Brian Clegg: How to Build a Time Machine and Extra-Sensory.

Another near-fortean topic that I have a whole shelf of books about is Buddhism (again many of them review copies, having spent 10 years as a book reviewer for the Buddhist Society). But I tend not to think of Buddhism as a fortean subject - unlike "alternative" religions, New Age beliefs and holistic therapies, all of which are quite well represented above. Amongst the latter is Scent Therapy by Raje Airey - who of the 10 or so authors featured here that I know personally, is the one I've known longest - since I went to school with her!

Looking at the picture above, I was surprised to see how biased my book-buying habits seem to be towards British authors. I honestly hadn't been aware of that until now. But certainly on subjects like UFOs, I do prefer the more methodical, less sensational approach of researchers like Jenny Randles, Nigel Watson, David Clarke and Mark Pilkington - with How UFOs Conquered the World and Mirage Men (book and DVD) by the latter two probably being my all-time favourite takes on the subject.

Turning to the older books pictured below, you'll spot quite a few classic UFO titles there - plus one oddity I was particularly pleased to find in a second-hand bookshop: The House of Lords UFO Debate (1979). Another rarity, which I've written about previously on this blog, is The Riddle of the Flying Saucers by Gerald Heard. Dating from 1950, it's the oldest of my UFO books - though not the oldest on this shelf, that honour going to Paranormal Cognition from 1944.

Another book I was pleased to get hold of was Damon Knight's biography of Charles Fort (with the brilliant subtitle "Prophet of the Unexplained", which sadly isn't shown on the spine). I bought this from a UK bookseller, but it's actually stamped "Miami Public Library" inside, so I'm not sure how and when it crossed the Atlantic. Another ex-library book - and a particularly battered and much-read copy it is too - is Three Men Seeking Monsters by Nick Redfern. In this case the library in question is much closer to home, on the Isle of Portland - specifically, the library of Portland Prison. The inmates there obviously include some very discerning readers!

50 Years of Fortean Times

Having got this blog back up and running, my next problem was to think of new things to write about. Since this month sees the 50th anniversary of the first issue of Fortean Times, it seems an obvious place to start.

Actually the magazine only carried the name "Fortean Times" from issue 16 onwards - prior to that, it was simply called The News. When its first issue appeared in November 1973, I was just short of 16 - i.e. old enough to have been interested in it if I'd known about it, but as it happened I was blissfully unaware of it. I believe the magazine's founding editor, Bob Rickard, was a member of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group, which I also joined around that time, so maybe I saw him there without knowing it (though I did get a brief but nice email from Bob many years later, as documented further down this post).

[Just as an aside before I forget - I did have one encounter at the BSFG with someone who, though now forgotten, was a big name in the fortean world at the time. This was Professor John Taylor, who was one of the first mainstream scientists to carry out laboratory experiments on Uri Geller and other people who displayed seemingly ESP-like powers. I attended a talk by him at the BSFG in April 1976.]

In common, I suspect, with many other people, I only really became aware of FT's existence in the early 1990s, after copies started to be distributed more widely to British newsagents. My first few issues (starting with #67 in February 1993, more than 30 years ago) are shown at the top of this post. Notice that the magazine's covers - by the brilliant and inimitable Hunt Emerson - were a lot livelier and more colourful in those days than they are today!

Over the years, I've made enough appearances in Fortean Times to consider myself a "regular contributor" to the magazine. To keep track of them (for myself if no one else), I've put a list of contributions on my website. So far they amount to 18 articles - mainly 1 or 2 page Forum pieces - and 46 book reviews, as well as 12 "letters to the editor", the first of them appearing way back in January 2001. But my personal high point came in June 2019, when FT printed David Clarke's interview with me about my time working in the Ministry of Defence (when I was peripherally involved in their UFO/UAP research). Here it is, complete with a photograph of me talking to a Russian scientist in Red Square (top picture on the right-hand page):

Returning to the subject of FT founder Bob Rickard, he's been mentioned quite a few times in previous posts on this blog, including a couple in the context of comic-book homages. The first (Fortean Agent of SHIELD) actually predates the founding of Fortean Times, coming from issue 12 of Marvel's Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD, cover-dated May 1969. That particular issue's creators, Steve Parkhouse and Barry Windsor-Smith, were friends of Bob at the time and named one of the story's characters "Robert Rickard" after him.

The other comic-book connection I wrote about, in The Department of Fortean Events, relates to a 2000 AD story called "Shamballa", featuring the Judge Anderson character. Written by Alan Grant and Arthur Ranson, the story is reprinted in book form in Judge Anderson: The Psi Files volume 02. As I explained in that earlier post, "Doc Rickard" - an obvious homage to FT's founder - is a paranormal researcher at the "Department of Fortean Events" (which doesn't really exist, but ought to).

I mentioned earlier that I once received an email from Bob Rickard, and I'll get onto that now. Back in February 2011, I put a short video clip on YouTube showing a scene from a video game which namechecks FT. It's from a Sam & Max episode called "Night of the Raving Dead", in which Sam, inspecting a complicated-looking piece of equipment, says "I'd bet my lifetime subscription to the Fortean Times that that's an alchemy machine".

I sent the video link to FT editors David Sutton and Paul Sieveking, and one of them must have forwarded it to Bob - because shortly afterwards I received an email from him saying "Great - my kids loved the first Sam & Max adventures". Here's the clip in question:

There's another connection between FT and video games that I'm aware of, which I mentioned on my other blog in May 2017, shortly after this one went into hiatus. It's a cameo appearance by a (sadly fictitious) magazine called Freaky Times, in the game Barrow Hill: The Dark Path by my favourite team of adventure game developers, Matt Clark and Jonathan Boakes. In case the magazine's oddly familiar cover design isn't enough of a giveaway, Jonathan himself once described it as "a little nod to the Fortean Times". Here's his cover mock-up from the game:

 

Tales of the Damned

Pictured above is Tales of the Damned: An Anthology of Fortean Horror – the latest title from the Fortean Fiction imprint of CFZ Publishing (with a specially painted cover by Anthony Wallis). Edited by the CFZ’s zoological director Richard Freeman, the book contains 25 stories all of which, in their distinctive and original ways, are variations on the theme of “fortean horror”. The book has been years in the making – I only became involved in the very late stages when I was offered the roles of copy editor and type setter. These are long and laborious tasks that should be avoided unless they’re well remunerated ... or the book is so good it’s a privilege to be involved with it. In this instance it was definitely the latter!

The book’s unique selling point is that a significant proportion of the stories are written by authors who specialize in Fortean non-fiction rather than fiction – including Richard himself, Corinna Downes, Rebecca Lang, Lars Thomas, Neil Arnold, Andy Roberts and Dr Karl Shuker. But there are plenty of established fiction writers too, including Nick Walters, Mark Clapham, Kate Kelly, Chris Lambert and Hannah Kate. No fewer than four of the contributors (two in each category) are important enough to have their own Wikipedia entries: Richard Freeman. Karl Shuker, Nick Walters and Mark Clapham.

I really can’t overstate how good this collection is. The general standard of the fiction is much higher than I’d expected, and at least a couple of the stories are potential award winners. Unfortunately, since I just told you I was involved in the book’s production, the cynics among you may think “well, he’s bound to say it’s good, isn’t he?” So all I can suggest is that you buy the book and read it from cover to cover ... and if you find a story that’s badly written, or unoriginal, or sloppily researched, or with a plot that doesn’t hang together or an ending that’s unsatisfying – then you’ll have to tell me, because I must have missed it.

You can see the contents list on the back cover of the book, reproduced below (yes, there’s a story by me in it – but don’t let that put you off). If you’re on Facebook, please consider liking the Tales of the Damned page – you can read a number of short excerpts from the book there, and more will be added in future.

Finally, here are a couple of links to find the book on Amazon:

• Tales of the Damned on Amazon UK
• Tales of the Damned on Amazon USA

The Enfield Haunting

First shown on subscription TV last year, the mini-series The Enfield Haunting was repeated on free TV a few weeks ago. Unfortunately it always seemed to be scheduled at awkward times, so I got fed up waiting and splurged £6.99 on the DVD. I’m really glad I did – it’s by far the best fortean-themed “based on real-life events” dramatization I’ve seen to date.

The usual problem with this genre is that the events in question are either 100% anecdotal or else utterly banal. That’s certainly not true here, where the case – more commonly referred to as “the Enfield poltergeist” – was exhaustively documented by means of photographs, audio recordings and multiple eyewitness testimony. Taking place in a north London council house in 1977-78, it was essentially a working-class version of The Exorcist, focused around a highly strung schoolgirl, her divorced mother and her three siblings.

I don’t know a huge amount about the case, but as far as I can tell the dramatized version sticks to the facts pretty faithfully. The characters are all based on real people, and the general sequence of events – including the bringing-in of psychic investigators and the intense interest of the tabloid media – is also true to life. No doubt events have been streamlined to some extent to make a more coherent story, and the main characters have been embellished to make them more interesting. However, the basic motivations of the two investigators – the eagerly credulous Maurice Grosse, who’s desperately looking for evidence of life-after-death, and the more cynical Guy Lyon Playfair, who just wants material for a new book – probably aren’t too wide of the mark.

The production is very British in its focus on acting and dialogue, as opposed to the traditional Hollywood reliance on screaming and special effects. The pivotal character of Maurice Grosse is played by Timothy Spall, who I became a fan of when I saw him in Mr Turner last year. Not that I imagine for a moment that the real JMW Turner was anything like as weird and interesting as Spall’s portrayal of him – and I’m sure the same is true of the late Maurice Grosse!

The Enfield Haunting also differs from more traditional horror movies in maintaining a fortean ambiguity as to what is actually going on. While some of the events do seem to be genuinely paranormal, others appear to be deliberate attention-seeking, and still others may be the involuntary result of emotional or behavioural problems, like a kind of super-Tourette syndrome. Or maybe it’s a mixture of all three. Having dug out some old Fortean Times articles – I found one by David Sutton from 2003 (FT166:39), one by Guy Lyon Playfair from 2007 (FT229:58-59) and one by Alan Murdie from 2012 (FT 288:18-19) – that seems to be pretty much the consensus about the real Enfield poltergeist, too.

With its setting in the late 1970s, The Enfield Haunting is a potentially perfect piece of retro-forteana. However, while I didn’t notice any actual anachronisms, I didn’t get a really strong sense of a “period drama” set four decades in the past either. I was worried this was an indication of just how behind the times I am (I mean, 1977 really does seem like yesterday sometimes) – but in one of the DVD extras the producers explain that they made a deliberate decision to understate the seventies setting, because it would have been a distraction from the serious story they wanted to tell.

As far as I can recall, this is the first time I’ve seen an on-screen actor portraying someone I’ve seen in real life. Matthew Macfadyen’s performance as Guy Lyon Playfair is a great foil to Timothy Spall’s Maurice Grosse – although I’m sure the real-life Playfair was never as snottily pretentious as Macfadyen plays him! Anyway, I saw the real Guy Lyon Playfair speaking at a paranormal conference in Bath a few years ago. Unfortunately it was too dark to take a decent photo while he was speaking, although I got a better shot of him as he was returning to his seat afterwards:

The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic

This has to be one of the most fortean items I’ve ever seen in a museum – a spoon that was supposedly bent “with mind power” by Uri Geller! I spotted it last week amongst countless other fascinating objects in the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, Cornwall. This was my second visit there – I went five years ago (see this blog post), but that was on a very busy day and the milling crowds made it difficult to see everything properly. It was much quieter last week and I managed to see a lot that I missed the first time – including Uri Geller’s spoon.

Other items on display include mediaeval books on witchcraft (including Saducismus Triumphatus, which I’ve written about before), protective charms used by soldiers in the 1st and 2nd world wars, Ouija boards, a large collection of magical artifacts that belonged to Gerald Gardner (the founder of modern Wicca), and several dead cats that had been walled up inside houses to keep the rats away. To top it all, there’s a “sex magic” display featuring a large number of little dicks (at least twice as many as I managed to get in this photo):

Actually the main reason I wanted to go to that part of Cornwall was to visit a much newer and less well known museum just a few miles from Boscastle – the Cornwall at War Museum. It’s off-topic for this blog, but highly recommended for anyone interested in 20th century military history. It’s a big place, occupying more than a dozen recently renovated buildings at what used to be RAF Davidstow. There are two full-size aircraft (a Hawker Hunter and a Fairey Gannet), several torpedoes, missiles and target drones, and loads of smaller items.

In one building I spotted an R1155 radio similar to the one I own (cf. the post about my various Museum Pieces). More surprisingly, in a different display in the same building I saw another very familiar object. This is something I’ve had since I was 12 years old, when I inherited all my father’s junk after he died. It’s nothing special – just a camera controller from a photo-reconnaissance aircraft – but I’ve always wondered exactly what period and what type of aircraft it came from. Unfortunately the one in the museum is unlabelled, although it appears to be identical to mine (as you can see from the two photos below). However, an online search yielded this page which includes a picture of one inside a 1950s-era Canberra PR.3/7.

Test your ESP

Here’s a nostalgic curiosity I found in a second-hand shop a couple of weeks ago. It’s called Know Your Own Psi-Q, and it’s the only retro-fortean book I’ve come across that contains computer code. The book dates from 1983 (or 1986 in the case of this paperback version), so the programs were written with things like the Apple II and BBC Micro in mind. However, I managed to convert one of them to JavaScript and will try embedding it at the bottom of this post.

The computer programs only take up one chapter of the book – the rest consists of what you might call “manual” tests. In effect they’re all guessing games. Typically you’re asked to do a repetitive task, like guessing the colour of playing cards before they’re turned over, and record the number of “hits” or correct guesses. Then you have to look at the tables in the back of the book (or use a formula for more complicated examples) in order to calculate your “z” score and hence the probability of obtaining that result from pure chance. According to the authors, you have “some Psi” if this probability is 1 in 20, “good Psi” if it is 1 in 100, and “excellent Psi” if it is 1 in 1000.

There are several problems with this. Firstly, it assumes there is a black-and-white choice between pure chance and ESP, with no other possible explanations. Secondly, if you do a lot of short test runs one after the other (20 of them, say), then the likelihood that one of them will yield a 1-in-20 result is pretty high, by definition (thanks to Peter Harriman for reminding me of this last week, in a completely different context). Finally, if you have to resort to hunting for small deviations from chance, then “extra-sensory perception” is far inferior to regular “sensory perception” (which comes close to 100% reliability and repeatability).

If you want an intelligent discussion of such issues, you won’t find them in Know Your Own Psi-Q – even though the authors, Hans Eysenck and Carl Sargent, were both professional psychologists who ought to have been aware of them. Your money is much better spent on Brian Clegg’s Extra-Sensory, which I mentioned a few weeks ago.

Now for my attempt at reproducing one of their computer programs. I’ve simplified it a bit, making it a straight choice between heads or tails. Imagine that the computer has just flipped a coin – and click on “heads” or “tails” according to which of them you think it is. As soon as you do this, the computer will tell you whether you were right or wrong, and immediately flip another coin. So then you can guess again. Keep doing this as many times as you like – the computer will accumulate your z-statistics, but only start displaying them after you’ve had at least 36 guesses.

Don’t click the “Restart” button unless you want to clear the statistics and start again from scratch (which you might want to do – as mentioned earlier, a large number of short runs is more likely to produce a high z-score than a single long run). What you’re aiming for is a z-score of 1.96 or higher, corresponding to “some Psi ability” according to Eysenck and Sargent.

TEST YOUR ESP BY GUESSING HEADS OR TAILS
Heads
Tails

DISCLAIMER: This is a cut-down version of Eysenck and Sargent’s Program 2 (“Clairvoyance Test”), with an updated user interface. The main reason for putting it here is to illustrate the tedious and soul-destroying nature of such tests. Please don’t expect it to demonstrate anything other than the random nature of JavaScript’s math.random() function. If it doesn’t work on whatever device you’re viewing this on, you aren’t missing anything.

Popular Science with a difference

Yet again I’ve been working so hard on my book about Pseudoscience and Science Fiction that I haven’t left enough time (or energy) to do a proper blog post this week. So I thought I’d just give a quick plug to three books by Brian Clegg that I’ve found very useful as reference sources:

• Final Frontier – the pioneering science and technology of exploring the universe
• How to Build a Time Machine – the real science of time travel
• Extra Sensory – the science and pseudoscience of telepathy and other powers of the mind

Despite their subject matter, all three of these books are about real, reputable science – even if they take pseudoscience and/or science fiction as a starting point for the discussion. Highly recommended for anyone wanting to understand the facts behind the speculations!

(Another of Brian’s books in a similar vein, Ten Billion Tomorrows, was mentioned in an earlier blog post)

I Call It Research

As mentioned in last week’s post, I’ve just embarked on a new writing project. It’s a book about the cross-fertilization of ideas between Fortean-style speculation and popular culture (which is why I was reading up about the X-Files last week). Obviously that’s a subject I’ve often written about on this blog, and there’s already a lot of potential material (books, magazines, comics, DVDs) lying around the house. But being ultra-meticulous about research, I also tracked down various other relevant fiction and nonfiction books on eBay. A selection of these are pictured above, together with some nostalgic DVDs I bought from my local HMV store (all in the interests of research, of course).

Pound-Shop Forteana

Here are two DVDs I bought for just a pound each (obviously) in a Poundland store last week – The Dyatlov Pass Incident and Skinwalkers. Both movies are based on true events of the Fortean kind. I first heard about Skinwalker Ranch at a talk by Ian Simmons at the Fortean Times Unconvention in October 2004, while the Dyatlov Pass incident made the cover of FT245 in February 2009. Both films were released in 2013, so the fact they’re already being sold at a massive discount suggests that perhaps they’re not very good. In the case of Skinwalkers that’s true – it might have made an enjoyable video game, but as a feature film it’s simply atrocious. On the other hand, The Dyatlov Pass Incident is a brilliant, five-star, film – the best low-budget horror movie I’ve seen in a long time.

Both films take the form of “found footage” following the disappearance of a team that set out to investigate the mystery in question. In the case of Skinwalker Ranch it’s essentially a modern take on the “haunted house” theme – with the usual ghosts, poltergeist phenomena and spectral hounds joined by UFOs, ancient aliens and animal mutilations. In the movie the ranch is being investigated by a group of professional paranormal researchers, and one of the few positive things I can say about it is that the entire cast looks the part (i.e. unattractive social misfits with no discernable personality). Their behaviour is anything but professional, though – the film belongs to the visceral school of horror, with large amounts of screaming and very little in the way of ratiocination.

The Dyatlov Pass Incident is a different matter altogether. To start with, the central mystery is far more intriguing. Instead of a rambling mashup of subjective phenomena occurring over an extended period of time, it’s tightly focused on one specific incident that left real physical evidence (nine dead bodies, to be precise). The aforementioned Fortean Times article, from 2009, began as follows:

The story sounds like something out of a low-budget horror movie: nine young students go on a skiing holiday in Russia’s Ural Mountains but never return. Eventually, their bodies are discovered – five of them frozen to death near their tent, four more bearing mysterious injuries – a smashed head, a missing tongue – buried in the snow some distance away. All, it seems, had fled in sudden terror from their camp in the middle of the night. [...] At the time, seemingly baffled investigators offered the non-explanation that the group had died as a result of “a compelling unknown force” – and then simply closed the case and filed it as “Top Secret”.

The incident took place in February 1959; the FT article coincided with its 50th anniversary. There are several factors that make Dyatlov Pass one of the 20th century’s most intriguing Fortean mysteries. What was the “compelling unknown force” that caused the students such terror? Why did the deaths from hypothermia occur before – not after – the deaths from crushing physical injuries? Why did several of the bodies show signs of radiation damage? What were the mysterious orange lights seen in the sky around the time of the incident? Most intriguingly of all – why did the Soviet military (this was during the Cold War, remember) stamp the case Top Secret and close the area off to civilians?

The film follows a group of American students who attempt to follow in the footsteps of their Russian predecessors – only to suffer the same fate. This is a much more cerebral film than Skinwalkers – with intelligent, educated characters who think things through and don’t do very much screaming at all. It has a strong plot – unexpectedly so for this type of film. The viewer is presented with a number of obvious choices (Was it a UFO encounter? Was it a Yeti-like creature? Was it a natural accident that has morphed into something more sinister through folklore and misinterpretation?)... and then – culminating in one of the most perfect twist endings I’ve ever seen – the movie comes up with a completely different, even more satisfying, explanation of its own. There’s a fine line between whetting the appetite and spoiling the plot, so I’ll just say “Philadelphia Experiment” and leave it at that.

A Fortean Episode of Columbo

There are two types of 1970s nostalgia: the kind you remember if you were around at the time, and the kind everyone remembers – even people who weren’t born yet. Most of the “TV heroes” featured in the one-shot magazine pictured above (undated, but I would guess 1974 or 1975) fall in the first category, but Columbo is a perfect example of the second. Originally just one of a rotating series of Mystery Movie titles (together with Banacek, The Snoop Sisters, Macmillan & Wife and several others), Columbo episodes continued to be reshown, year after year, long after the others were forgotten. Today in the UK, Columbo reruns can be seen regularly on both ITV and Channel 5.

The original Mystery Movie series ran from 1971 to 1978, but Columbo was sufficiently popular that it was brought back for several more seasons starting in 1989 (the original series aired in the USA on the NBC network and in the UK on ITV; the revival was shown on ABC in America and on Sky in Britain). The first episode of the new series, “Columbo Goes to the Guillotine”, is described at IMDb as follows: “An egocentric psychic murders his old mentor, a magician charged to expose him as fraud, by beheading him while he’s rehearsing his guillotine trick.” That sounds interesting enough, and it’s pretty much how I remembered the episode from having seen it a quarter of a century ago (soon after I acquired a cable TV connection). But having watched a rerun on Channel 5 a few weeks ago, the episode is actually much less clichéd – and far more Fortean – than that brief synopsis suggests.

[Just to state the obvious before going any further, nothing I say here is going to constitute a plot spoiler. As with virtually all Columbo episodes, this one takes the form of an inverted mystery, in which the audience learns the identity of the murderer, and his motive and method, right at the outset. The spoiler would be to say how Columbo disentangles the evidence, and I’m not going to do that.]

The first thing that struck me as Fortean – or at any rate something that’s going to make more sense to someone interested in Forteana, rather than the clichéd expectations of a casual viewer – is that the “psychic” in the story works for a government-funded institute for psychic research, rather than performing his feats in front of a public audience. For me, this is a potentially much more interesting – and realistic – setting. What’s also realistic is that the institute’s director, Paula Hall, is pulled in two opposing directions. On the one hand, she wants to carry out a serious scientific investigation of extra-sensory perception, which (as in the real world) involves looking for small statistical glitches in long, laborious experiments. On the other hand, she needs to keep those government funds coming in – and that requires the kind of impressive, unambiguous results that can only be achieved by cheating.

Her star psychic, Elliott Blake, may or may not have a genuine paranormal talent – but there’s no doubt he’s a highly skilled trickster. The two of them have worked out routines to fool the government observers, but even in private they keep up the pretence that Elliott really does have an underlying extrasensory talent – although it’s one that can’t be relied on to perform to order. In the case of Elliott, this attitude is probably out-and-out charlatanism; in the case of Paula it may be more along the lines of wishful thinking. I thought this was a clever touch, because it reflects a common phenomenon in the Fortean world – some people seem to think it’s OK to falsify evidence as long as it supports something they sincerely believe in (I could stray off the subject here and start talking about Bigfoot bodies and alien autopsy videos, but I won’t).

A relevant quote from the IMDb article (spoken by Elliott Blake): “Our Mr. Harrow is not impressed by statistics. This man is in the market for miracles. I have the power to astonish him, you, and the entire world, Paula, but I am not a dancing dog in a carnival!” Mr Harrow is a shadowy government agent, interested in ESP because of its potential use in espionage: he wants “a demonstration that you can telepathically and precisely intercept the thoughts and actions of an enemy”. This again is a touch of realism; in 1989 the Cold War was still in full swing. Keeping a step ahead of the enemy – by whatever means possible – was the government’s Number One priority.

The opening scene of the episode shows an experiment with Zener cards (circle, cross, wavy lines, square, star) of the kind that really were used in laboratory ESP experiments. When Columbo first sees them they are simply referred to as “ESP cards”, but later he uses the technical term “Zener card”. Perhaps the dumbing-down editor (I assume all TV shows have such a thing) crossed out “Zener” in one part of the script and missed it in another!

Another clear Fortean reference is the “Randi” poster hanging on the wall of the victim’s workshop. The Amazing Randi, of course, is a professional magician who has a sideline in exposing fake psychics. The same description fits the aforementioned victim – Max Dyson, or “Max the Magnificent”. He has two jobs – one is debunking frauds on behalf of the government and other clients, and the other is making magic props such as the guillotine Elliott Blake uses to kill him. But contrary to what you might expect (and what I’d remembered from 25 years ago), Elliott doesn’t kill Max because he was on the point of exposing him as a trickster. The story is a lot cleverer than that... you really ought to check it out next time you see “Columbo Goes to the Guillotine” in the TV schedules.

Lost Souls of Dorset

I belatedly finished Dark Fall: Lost Souls – another great game from Jonathan Boakes, creator of The Lost Crown. I originally bought it on DVD four years ago, a few months after it first came out. But after playing it for several days, and getting about half-way through, the game suddenly refused to load. Several attempts at uninstalling and reinstalling failed to cure the problem, so I guess I must have damaged the disc or corrupted the licence file or something (there’s also an alternative paranormal explanation, which I’ll get to later).

A couple of weeks ago I saw Dark Fall: Lost Souls on special offer on Steam for just £2.49 (a temporary reduction from the normal price of £9.99). Needless to say I snapped it up – and I’m glad I did. It’s only in the second half of the game, which I’d been prevented from playing, that the high strangeness really sets in (I still had all my savegames, so I could pick up where I left off). I’m not saying the first half is weak, but it’s essentially just scene-setting. Apart from the wonderfully atmospheric graphics and soundtrack, it’s pretty much a run-of-the-mill point-and-click adventure. But once you’ve found your way up to the hotel’s guest rooms (which is the point I’d got to four years ago) the game really comes into its own – Boakesian weirdness at its best.

As with The Lost Crown, part of the attraction of Dark Fall: Lost Souls is its decaying small-town setting, replete with nostalgic reminders of the simpler world of the mid-twentieth century. What makes it even more interesting for me is that it’s set in Dorset, right on my doorstep. The name of the town, Dowerton (which also featured in the original Dark Fall game, which I haven’t played) is fictitious, and doesn’t have an obvious correspondence with any real Dorset location. The town doesn’t seem to have a beach, yet it’s large enough to have an 18-room hotel. The 1947 rail route (see top-right screenshot above) indicates that it was on a branch line of the Great Western Railway from Dorchester, but I don’t believe there ever was such a thing. There was a GWR branch line from Maiden Newton to Bridport, however – and using that as an analog would put Dowerton ten to fifteen miles south of where I live. That’s what I’d like to think, anyhow!

Dowerton is a town that has seen better days. The train station is abandoned, as is the adjacent hotel. The youths of the town have turned to Satanism, and the hotel is reputed to be haunted. Associated with the occult since the 1950s, the place took a nosedive in 2005 with the disappearance of 11-year-old Amy Haven – a disruptive child who had become obsessed with the paranormal.

The action of the game takes place five years after Amy’s disappearance. It’s played from the first person perspective of a retired police officer known only as The Inspector. “Retired” is a euphemism, actually – the Inspector was fired for fabricating evidence against the chief suspect in the Amy Haven case. This was a sleazy middle-aged man named Mr Bones, who had befriended the child and initiated her into the ways of the occult. Bones denied having harmed her, claiming Amy had voluntarily chosen to pass over to the other side.

The Inspector is still driven to discover the truth about the case. Amy’s ghost has been seen lurking around the old station, so one night he decides to go there and investigate. As he does so, he receives a series of anonymous text messages on his phone, from someone or something that clearly knows a lot about the case.

As I’ve already said, the action starts fairly normally – although exploring a disused train station that has been used for Satanic rituals is always going to have its spooky moments, especially in the dead of night. It’s when the Inspector gets inside the hotel, though, that things really start to get weird. He encounters the restless ghosts of various former occupants who died by committing suicide, and he experiences timeslips that take him back to critical turning points in their lives. He is able to change history, thus freeing the ghosts from their torments. But do things like that happen in the real world? Some aspects of the action have a distinctly dreamlike (or nightmare-like) quality, and on a couple of occasions the Inspector briefly finds himself lying on a hospital operating table while medics fight to resuscitate him.

The Lost Crown was open to a whole range of interpretations, and Dark Fall: Lost Souls is no different. One extreme view would be that the resuscitation scenes are the only objective reality in the game, while the rest is a kind of near-death experience (and I do mean near death – the suggestion at the end, to my relief, was that the Inspector would pull through). In this interpretation, the Inspector is driven by his curiosity and feelings of guilt to re-examine the facts of the case in the form of a lucid dream – hence most of the game is nothing more than a hallucination.

In another extreme interpretation, the operating table scenes would be the only hallucinations, while everything else is objectively real. In this view, the Inspector would end up the villain of the piece – a callous murderer – while Amy and Mr Bones would be innocent victims. But that doesn’t accord with the personality of the Inspector as it comes across in the game – the compassionate way he deals with the ghosts, and his genuine desire to learn the truth. Amy, on the other hand, is not a nice child – although a lot of this may be down to Mr Bones corrupting her impressionable young mind. Anyhow, the ghosts all blame Amy’s presence in the hotel for prolonging their suffering.

My own view lies somewhere between these extremes. I think it’s true that the only physically objective reality is the Inspector lying on an operating table in hospital. But rather than a hallucination, I believe he undergoes an out-of-body experience. His astral body really does travel to the hotel, where he really does encounter the spirits that live there, and he really does free the “lost souls” from the torment Amy is holding them in.. At the same time, other aspects of his experience – the SMS messages in particular – are superimposed on events by his own self-doubts.

But that’s just my own view, because – to put it bluntly – I really liked the Inspector and I really disliked Amy and Mr Bones. I’m sure other people will have their own interpretations!

When I resumed playing the game after the lapse of four years, I started a little way back from the last savegame so I could ease myself back into it. And I noticed a really spooky coincidence that may (if you like paranormal explanations) be the real reason the game broke at the exact moment it did.

When the Inspector arrives at hotel reception, he finds his name written in the guest-book together with the date at which the action is supposed to take place – November 5th, 2010 (see the first screenshot below). As British readers won’t need telling, this is Guy Fawkes Night, and in the outdoor scenes you see fireworks exploding in the night sky over Dowerton station. The Inspector’s arrival time is given as 8 pm, and I played for perhaps an hour and a half after that point before the game suddenly refused to load.

And what is the time-stamp on my last savegame? As you can see from the second screenshot below (zoom in on the bottom left-hand corner), it was “5.11.2010, 21:26”. This uses the 24-hour clock, so 21:26 means just before half past nine in the evening. And it uses the British day-month-year convention, so 5.11.2010 was... November 5th, 2010!

The Lost Crown

There aren’t many computer games that have the author’s name on the cover, but in the case of The Lost Crown it’s well-deserved – Jonathan Boakes created the whole thing virtually single-handed. I originally bought the game in September 2008 – only a couple of months after it first came out, and long enough ago to have forgotten most of the details. But that didn’t stop me from entering the Lost Crown quiz that Jonathan ran on his blog a couple of weeks ago.

I approached Jonathan’s quiz in the true spirit of adventure games, which are all about resourcefulness, after all. I know “resourcefulness” isn’t precisely synonymous with “cheating”, but it’s certainly consistent with using Google when your memory isn’t quite up to the task. Even then, there were a couple of answers I wasn’t sure about... so I was pleasantly surprised to learn that I was among the five lucky winners (picked at random from the ten people who got top marks in the quiz). My prize was a free key for the newly released Steam version of The Lost Crown.

Although the details had faded, the general atmosphere of the game is impossible to forget. In a sense, it’s stretching things to call it a “game” at all – it comes across more as interactive storytelling. The Lost Crown is almost unique in that respect. In most point-and-click adventures, the narrative is simply a convenient vehicle to get you from one puzzle to the next. The interest lies in decoding cryptic messages, or putting unlikely objects together to construct even more unlikely objects, or whatever else you need to do in order to progress through the game as quickly as possible. The playable characters don’t get emotionally tied up in the plot, and a die-hard gamer can safely ignore all those boring grown-up things like characterization, subtext and back-story.

The Lost Crown isn’t like that at all. It contains very few traditional-style puzzles, and when they do crop up you can whizz through them pretty quickly. It’s really much more about slow, methodical exploration and perseverance. That may sound dull – and I guess it would be dull for the kind of gamer who just wants to... well, play a game. But if you think of it as being immersed in your own personalized horror movie, then The Lost Crown really comes into its own. The evocative black-and-white settings, the bizarre cast of characters and the atmospheric soundtrack all help to create an emotional depth and a sense of genuine mystery that is much more than “just a game”.

The plotline of The Lost Crown consists of multiple interwoven threads, but all those threads are Fortean in one way or another. You’ve got conspiracies and paranoia. You’ve got ancient legends. You’ve got timeslips and other paranormal phenomena. And you’ve got ghosts... lots of them.

The story starts with the main character, Nigel Danvers, attempting to escape the clutches of his employers – a sinister high-tech corporation called Hadden Industries. It seems that Nigel, either inadvertently or deliberately, came across some computer files that were above his pay grade (“Danvers has seen and heard too much! He knows about the chasm, and D Labs. He could have seen the experiment.”). Nigel takes the train to a small (and entirely fictional) town on the coast of East Anglia called Saxton. An isolated and strangely old-fashioned place, it looks like the ideal hideaway for Nigel... but there’s always the sneaking suspicion that Saxton is precisely where Hadden wants him to be.

The official Lost Crown website quotes the Fortean Times review as saying that “a sense of unease and isolation develops similar to that evoked by the film The Wicker Man”. In some ways that’s a good comparison – certainly the creepy feeling that everyone in town except the protagonist knows what’s going on. Nigel wasn’t expecting to end up in Saxton, but it seems that at least some of the Saxton residents were expecting Nigel.

The subplot of the “lost crown” itself is based on (or perhaps it’s more accurate to say inspired by) the M.R. James short story “A Warning to the Curious”. The key idea here is that a crown dating from Anglo-Saxon times is buried somewhere on the East Coast. According to legend, the crown protects the country from invasion. If you believe the legend, you’ll leave the crown where it is. If you don’t believe the legend, you’ll seek out the “treasure”. Nigel, of course, can be counted on to make the wrong decision.

There’s another homage to M.R. James in a scene featuring a young hippie couple named Karswell – after the villain in the brilliant short story “Casting the Runes” (and the equally brilliant 1957 film Night of the Demon based on it). This scene is significant in that it’s the one unambiguous case of a timeslip in the game. Nigel later learns that the Karswells died more than 20 years earlier – and not only that, but the house where he had dinner with them burned down at the same time (unfortunately, you can’t go back to the Karswells’ house after you discover this – I would have liked to see with my own eyes that it was nothing but a decades-old burned out ruin!).

I referred to the Karswell house as an “unambiguous” timeslip because there’s explicit documentary evidence within the game that the house burned down before Nigel visited it. But if you want “ambiguous” temporal anomalies, The Lost Crown is full of them! Nigel arrives in Saxton (or Sedgemarsh, to be pedantic) on a steam train – something that strikes him as odd, but doesn’t seem to bother the station master. The barmaid refuses to tell him what year it is. Present-day newspapers contain antiquated-looking advertisements for goods priced in shillings (which were phased out in 1970). The villainous Ager brothers only exist as ghosts today – but there’s conflicting evidence as to just what century they lived in (18th? 19th? 20th?).

The first time I played the game I spent a lot of time worrying about these anomalies. The second time around, I just took them in my stride. I don’t think there’s any profound significance to them – they’re simply part of the vaguely surreal nature of Saxton. In some ways the place reminds me of the village in the Prisoner TV series – you just have to take it on its own terms, not try to apply logical analysis to it.

The Lost Crown’s subtitle is “A Ghost-Hunting Adventure”, and it certainly lives up to that. Despite the homages to M.R. James, the various ghosts you encounter tend to be closer to “real ghosts” than those of traditional ghost stories. And by “real ghosts” I mean the kind of ghosts people who believe in such things claim to encounter in the real world! There’s a strong sense of realism in the way Nigel goes about ghost-hunting, too, with orb photography, EVP recordings and a satisfyingly jittery EMF meter – gadgets that would have baffled M.R. James, but are the stock-in-trade of the modern paranormal investigator.

Nigel is supported in his ghost-hunting activities by a psychology student named Lucy Reubans – arguably Saxton’s only non-creepy resident! The juxtaposition of believer Nigel and skeptic Lucy is an obvious echo of Mulder and Scully... and the game’s mixture of supernatural and man-made horror is also reminiscent of The X-Files. The most genuinely frightening scene in The Lost Crown is the one where you discover where the town’s cats have been disappearing to – and it’s got nothing to do with ghosts! I don’t think that’s a coincidence, either, because deep down you know that ghosts can’t hurt you... but a psychotic with a butcher’s knife can!

One of the great attractions of The Lost Crown for me is that you spend hours exploring the kind of places I like to explore in the real world – old churches, caves, coastal paths, a quirky museum, an old railway station, an antique store... even a New Age shop! I’ve never been to East Anglia, where the story is set, but the actual locations were filmed much closer to home, in and around Polperro in Cornwall.

The good news for Lost Crown fans is that Jonathan is putting the finishing touches on a sequel, called Blackenrock. Personally, I can’t wait!

Paranormal Shakespeare

Today, Shakespeare’s plays are the epitome of respectable mainstream culture, while all things paranormal are relegated to the crackpot fringe. Aspiring authors who want their books to be studied in the hallowed halls of English Literature would be well advised to steer clear of tales of ghosts, witches, demons and sorcery. Such topics are a sure sign of lowbrow fiction, aren’t they? But the plays of Shakespeare are anything but lowbrow, and they’re packed full of tales of ghosts, witches, demons and sorcery.

Shakespeare was the archetypal Renaissance Man. He was a contemporary of Galileo and Francis Bacon, the pioneers of the scientific method, and also of John Dee – the most famous occultist in English history. As Shakespeare’s most famous character, Hamlet, said: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”. Horatio’s philosophy was Humanism – the precursor of modern Skepticism. Shakespeare himself was more open-minded.

A previous post (More things in Heaven and Earth) described the pivotal role played by the paranormal in Hamlet. This is one of the most highly-regarded works of English literature, and yet the whole action of the play is set in motion by an encounter with a ghost. The apparition is seen by multiple witnesses, and it imparts information that later turns out to be true – although it couldn’t have been obtained by non-paranormal means (for more on the ghost in Hamlet, see The Ghost of Lulworth Cove on the Dark Dorset blog).

Hamlet isn’t the only work by Shakespeare where paranormal phenomena play a central role. In Macbeth, the title character is set on his road to power (and his ultimate downfall) by the prophecies of the three witches. Everything the witches predict during the course of the play comes to pass... although not always in the way Macbeth expects. The witches in Macbeth aren’t the evil Satan-worshippers of mediaeval imagination, but wise and superhumanly powerful women in the pagan tradition.

And that’s just the start of it. There are ghostly encounters in Julius Caesar and Richard the Third. There’s magic and sorcery in The Tempest, and midnight necromancy in Henry VI Part 2. There’s astrology and demonology in King Lear. There are paranormal-inspired high jinks in The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Comedy of Errors. And much more.

You can read all about Paranormal Shakespeare in a short ebook by myself that’s just been published by Bretwalda Books. It’s available from various places, including Amazon.com, Amazon UK, iTunes, Barnes & Noble and W H Smith.

Big Black Cats: Physical or Paranormal?

Many Fortean phenomena, from ghosts and UFOs to Bigfoot and other cryptids, revolve around witness accounts of strange sightings. In most cases, if the object seen is what the witness believes it is – an extraterrestrial spacecraft, the spirit of a dead human being, a huge hairy apeman – then it would be a truly earth-shattering, paradigm-shifting event. When it comes to the subject of “Big Cats in Britain”, however, that’s just not the case. The issue here is simply a known species that happens to be a few thousand miles from its normal habitat. For this reason, the whole subject of “out-of-place animals” is one that’s never really interested me that much. But last week I came across a couple of blog posts that made me look at the subject in a different light.

First there was The Big Cat Mystery from Kate Kelly's blog The Scribbling SeaSerpent. Amongst other things, Kate says: “There is another line of thought that they are creatures from the spirit world that pass across occasionally into ours; the rationale behind this theory being that the cats described by witnesses are so variable in appearance.” This is a really fascinating idea. Prior to the 20th century, there were frequent sightings of “phantom black dogs” in Britain, which were emphasised to have supernatural qualities. They were unnaturally large, they had glowing eyes, and they appeared and disappeared in the blink of an eye. In more recent, more materialistic times, these black dogs seem to have been superseded by “black panthers” and “black pumas”, which witnesses describe as being flesh-and-blood creatures – although they may not be.

The second piece I saw last week – a similar idea approached from a different angle – was all about an ancient pagan ritual called the Taigheirm. This was the subject of a post by Nick Redfern on the Mysterious Universe blog, called Sacrifice and Supernatural Cats. Before I go into details, I’ll just try and squeeze in the painting on the left, which I saw on the Dark Classics blog a few days ago. It’s called “A Scene of Sorcery”, and it was painted by Domenicus van Wijnen around 1685. It’s a depiction of some kind of demonic ritual, although it’s not the Taigheirm, and it’s got a cat in it, although no-one seems especially interested in sacrificing it. But it’s a really spooky painting, all the same.

According to Nick’s Mysterious Universe post, the Taigheirm ritual had its roots in pagan times, but continued to be performed in remote parts of Scotland well into the 19th century. The ceremony involved the sacrificial roasting of domestic cats, with the aim of “coming into communication with the powers of darkness”. According to a supposed eyewitness account, “after a certain continuance of the sacrifice, infernal spirits appeared in the shape of black cats. There came continually more and more of these cats; and their howlings, mingled with those roasting on the spit, were terrific. Finally appeared a cat of a monstrous size, with dreadful menaces.”

Whether the “Big Black Cats” encountered in Britain today are likewise paranormal phenomena, or whether they have any physical reality, is a moot point. The same could be said, of course, about many other Fortean sightings... with one important difference. Ufologists, for example, have a tendency to burst into tears if you suggest UFOs may have a non-physical explanation. It simply isn’t as exciting as the idea of nuts-and-bolts extraterrestrial spacecraft. On the other hand, a ghostly creature from another realm of existence is far more exciting than a flesh-and-blood member of the genus Panthera, that just happens to find itself on the wrong continent!

For anyone who is interested in raw data on British Big Cat sightings, I helped to set up an online resource on the subject last summer: The CFZ Mystery Cat Database. This draws on a huge number of news reports collected over several years by Jon Downes and his colleagues, for which I've tried to produce a user-friendly interface. The result is only partly satisfactory – it seems to work with some browsers but not others. Also, the keyword assignment was done mechanically, rather than by a human – so it quite often throws up irrelevant results (or misses relevant ones). For what it’s worth, I also produced a short demonstration video on YouTube.

Literary name-dropping

I’ve always had a special liking for novels that are filled with factual references. I may be in a minority on this -- most people see this sort of thing as shameless padding, which it probably is! But I like it because it’s one of the most painless ways to learn new things. It’s one of the reasons why Philip K. Dick’s VALIS is a favourite novel of mine, and why I like The Da Vinci Code despite its awfulness. The first book of this type that I ever came across was a novel by Robert Silverberg called Dying Inside, which I read 40 years ago when it was first printed in the July-August and September-October 1972 issues of Galaxy magazine. These were among the first grown-up science fiction magazines I ever read -- I was about 14¾ at the time.

Dying Inside is a vaguely Fortean novel, about a telepath who earns a living ghost-writing essays for students who have more money than brains. It isn’t the most thrilling adventure ever written—in fact it’s positively dull—but it’s got a lot of sexual references in it, which are quite interesting when you’re 14¾. It’s also packed full of factual allusions... almost none of which I understood at the time, although I was fascinated by them nonetheless.

There are references to classical music—Schoenberg, Beethoven, Mahler, Berg, Bartok, Bach and Schoenberg, and to high literature from Aeschylus and Sophocles to Balzac, Dostoyevsky and Proust. When I was a student in the late seventies I used to listen to Radio Three a lot, and developed a taste for all the composers mentioned. Great literature, on the other hand, is something I’ve never had much interest in.... although I did go through a phase circa 1975 of trying very hard to read Finnegans Wake, which Silverberg also alludes to (“Earwicker’s borborygmi”). I’ve got more time for poets than I have for heavyweight novelists, and he namedrops some of the best: Tennyson, Browning and T.S. Eliot (whose ashes are buried at East Coker, a few miles from where I live).

For some reason, there aren’t that many painters mentioned in Dying Inside, but the ones who are are among my favourites: Hieronymus Bosch, Peter Bruegel and El Greco. Another artist, M.C. Escher, is referred to as M.G. Escher!

There are very few scientists, too—the only one I found when I just looked through was J.W. Gibbs, whose name will mean a lot to anyone who did physics at university and very little to anyone else. On the whole, though, Silverberg is less interested in the materialistic side of things than the mystical: he mentions Thomas Aquinas and St Augustine, the Tao Te Ching and the Bhagavad-Gita, and a number of quasi-forteans such as J. B Rhine, Arthur Koestler, Wilhelm Reich and Edgar Cayce. He also mentions the I Ching, which features in Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle (which I didn’t read until 1976) and General Semantics, which features in A.E. van Vogt’s masterpiece The World of Null-A (which I didn’t read until 1994!).

Silverberg even namedrops a couple of fellow science fiction authors: Theodore Sturgeon and Isaac Asimov. Seeing Asimov on his visit to Birmingham in 1974 was the high point of the seventies for me... even though I saw Silverberg himself at the Eastercon in Manchester the following year!

Post-Fortean Books

Several years ago I used the lulu.com self-publishing website to set up my own “publishing imprint” called Post-Fortean Books. But because I had a properly paying job at the time, I didn’t really have the leisure or motivation to do much in the way of marketing or publicity. Since then times have changed, and I’ve just gone through the process of reissuing all the books on Kindle. Four of them are also listed on iTunes, while the other two have just been submitted. Here are the details (in each case the link at the beginning goes to the US Amazon site and the one at the end to amazon.co.uk):

The Case of the Invisible College and Other Mysteries: A collection of Sherlock-Holmes style detective stories set in present-day Oxford. All the stories have loosely Fortean themes (“The Dangerous Book”, “The Invisible College”, “The Shakespearean Super-Chimp”, “The Abducted Astrobiologist”, “The Ghost in the Machine”, “The Shocking Science Quarterly” and “The Inverted Pyramid”). This one is listed on iBooks. [Get it from Amazon UK]

The Aquarius Code: A loose pastiche of The Da Vinci Code, written in 2006 when such things were topical. My story has a stronger fantasy/sci-fi element, though, and plenty of Fortean trappings (Earth Mysteries, Glastonbury, occult rites, Illuminati etc). A 17,000 word novella. This one has just shown up on iTunes as well as Kindle. [Get it from Amazon UK]

The Promethean Galaxy: This is the only non-fiction work on the list. It’s a short (18,000 words) "exploration of the Galaxy" in science, philosophy, arts, mysticism and literature. It’s Fortean only in the sense that it refuses to take sides. Again, this one has just appeared on iTunes as well. [Get it from Amazon UK]

Kundalini Conspiracy: A 23,000 word novella that I stitched together in 2004 from several earlier short stories. Not great literature, but it’s bursting with Fortean themes (abductions, government conspiracies, past-life regression, mind control, Lovecraftian cults, cattle mutilation and probably other things I’ve forgotten). I tried to make the hero sympathetic, but I’ve been told he’s an obnoxious little pervert. This one is available as a printed book as well as being listed on iTunes and Kindle. [Get it from Amazon UK]

The Naked Guru: Just a short story (7,000 words). This is another one set in Oxford, but the style is very different from The Invisible College... more in the “sleazy comic-book sci-fi” genre (if such a thing exists). I billed this one as “For Mature Readers Only” because it’s all about a sex cult, though actually the sexual content isn’t much greater than Kundalini Conspiracy or The Aquarius Code. Only on Kindle so far. [Get it from Amazon UK]

Six Dimensional Sex: Another one for mature readers! This is set in the Swinging Sixties, and it’s a parody of a particular type of science fiction that was popular at that time -- both in its repetitively sexual narrative and avant-garde writing style. It’s an absolutely terrible book (deliberately, because I was parodying a terrible style) but my hope is that the word Sex in the title will sell it despite its awfulness. Again, this one is only on Kindle so far. [Get it from Amazon UK]