The central British Fortean.
Eric Frank Russell was born in Berkshire, England, 6 January 1905. His father was an instructor at the Royal Military Academy. He’s ben the subject of a recent biography—Into Your Tent—and so my own biographical contribution will be brief, and this (very long) post will be mostly an intellectual history. He was raised in Egypt; he variously worked as a telephone operator, quantity surveyor, draughtsman, commercial traveller (something like a traveling salesman) and technical writer for a Liverpool steel company. He was influenced by the American (religious) skeptic, Robert Ingersoll. Russell discovered science fiction via the British Interplanetary Society in the mid-1930s, and started writing around that time. He became closely associated with the editor John W. Campbell, though he also published some in “Weird Tales.” Russell used a number of pseudonyms.
He visited America in 1939, and in the 1940s served in the RAF, in which he worked as a wireless mechanic and radio operator. Russell spent more of his time writing int he late 1940s, but also continued to work elsewhere. He continued to be active through the 1950s, but his output dropped precipitously in the 1960s, mostly collections and reprints—this after a heart attack in 1959, the same year Tiffany Thayer died of one. John L. Ingham, his biographer, notes that Russell was coarse and sometimes hard to get along with. He cursed a lot, and wore his various prejudices on his sleeve: he was anti-Semitic and not fond of Italians. Russell was tall—6’2”—and lanky.
Eric Frank Russell was born in Berkshire, England, 6 January 1905. His father was an instructor at the Royal Military Academy. He’s ben the subject of a recent biography—Into Your Tent—and so my own biographical contribution will be brief, and this (very long) post will be mostly an intellectual history. He was raised in Egypt; he variously worked as a telephone operator, quantity surveyor, draughtsman, commercial traveller (something like a traveling salesman) and technical writer for a Liverpool steel company. He was influenced by the American (religious) skeptic, Robert Ingersoll. Russell discovered science fiction via the British Interplanetary Society in the mid-1930s, and started writing around that time. He became closely associated with the editor John W. Campbell, though he also published some in “Weird Tales.” Russell used a number of pseudonyms.
He visited America in 1939, and in the 1940s served in the RAF, in which he worked as a wireless mechanic and radio operator. Russell spent more of his time writing int he late 1940s, but also continued to work elsewhere. He continued to be active through the 1950s, but his output dropped precipitously in the 1960s, mostly collections and reprints—this after a heart attack in 1959, the same year Tiffany Thayer died of one. John L. Ingham, his biographer, notes that Russell was coarse and sometimes hard to get along with. He cursed a lot, and wore his various prejudices on his sleeve: he was anti-Semitic and not fond of Italians. Russell was tall—6’2”—and lanky.
For a long time, he lived in Liverpool, before setting up a second home on the Isle of Man. He married and Ellen Broadhurst in 1930; they had one child, Erica, born in 1934, who shared her father’s birth day. She would later move to New Zealand.
Eric Frank Russell died 28 February 1978, aged 73.
**********************
Russell came to Fort twice, both times through science fiction, though only the second one taking, apparently. In August 1934, he wrote to the British Interplanetary Society—founded by the anti-Fortean P. E. Cleator the previous year—Russell apparently interested in the idea of interplanetary communications, and considering writing something for the BIS on the subject. He considered himself a rationalist at the time, and had studied scientific subjects in college. A correspondence sprang up between Russell and the co-founder of the BIS, Leslie L. Johnson.
Russell was reading science fiction at this time, including “Astounding Stories,” which was then being edited by F. Orlin Tremaine, and would have seen the serialization of Fort’s “Lo!,” that ran in 1934. But it had no effect on him, or so he said. Still, Russell was intrigued by the idea of writing some science fiction of his own, and his first attempt, “Eternal Re-Diffusion,” was based on an idea given to him by Johnson; Tremaine rejected it.
British science fiction overlapped with the BIS to a great extent at this time. Walter Gillings, who would be a hub of science fiction in England, became associated with the BIS at about the same time as Russell, and Russell would move into science fiction fandom that Gillings helped to organize; meanwhile, Russell and Johnson visited Olaf Stapledon and introduced him to both science fiction fandom and the BIS. In 1936, Russell and Johnson left Liverpool to visit science fiction fans in London, including Gillings, helping to knit together the network of British fandom; World War II would set back the movement to a great degree, though there continued to be meetings, but it was out of this network that post-War British fandom was reborn. In time, Russell would come to resent fans, and their demands and cheapskate ways—using libraries and second-hand bookstores and swapping stories, depriving him of royalties—but at the time he was fully immersed in the culture.
It was while haunting a second-hand bookstore during the middle 1930s that Russell came across Fort for the second time. He discovered the Gollancz edition of Fort’s “Lo!,” and was enraptured—it was the start of a move decidedly away from rationalism. He started hunting Fort’s other works, finding a copy of his only novel, “The Outcast Manufacturers,” and then “Book of the Damned” and “Wild Talents,” for which he paid exorbitant amounts. He also must have reached out to Tiffany Thayer in regards to the Fortean Society, because when the first issue of the Society’s magazine appeared, in September 1937, he was listed as a regional correspondent. As it happens, he was the only one of the dozen who had any continued interest in the Fortean Society—and, boy, what interest he had!
Russell sold his first science fiction story, “The Saga of Pelican West,” in 1937, and followed this with three more sales, all to Tremaine. When Tremaine was replaced as editor of Astounding by John W. Campbell, though, Russell found it harder to make sales (according to Sam Moskowitz). Campbell had very specific ideas about what counted as science fiction, and Robert Heinlein also went through a similar difficulty trying to calibrate stories to Campbell’s prejudices. Moskowitz says that, in desperation, Russell flipped through Fort’s books looking for an idea. (One is reminded of the apocryphal story, reported by H. Allen Smith, that Hecht prized Fort because he gave hm a story idea that levered him out of hock.) “I think we’re property,” Fort had written, and this gave Russell an idea.
He wrote a novel, in his spare time, called “Forbidden Acres,” based around this notion. Russell was working out his own ideas of science fiction in the pulp mode. He told readers of the British science fiction magazine “Tomorrow” that authors such as Stapledon and Fort educated and made audiences think hard; that was not pulp’s forte. Rather, the pulp author should seek to entertain—story was more important than scientific plausibility, he would say, another step away from rationalism—but that meant pulp authors needed to do more than plot. Plot was all anyone focused on. Writers for the pulp market also needed to focus on characterization and style, to make the story come alive. He himself was endeavoring to texture his stories, borrowing especially from the American crime pulps, with their wise-cracking heroes, and that was the case with “Forbidden Acres,” too.
“Forbidden Acres” started as a murder mystery, of sorts, with the mysterious deaths of a number of scientists. As the story evolved, it became clear that they had discovered a way to see beyond the usual edge of the human visual spectrum—to the “Forbidden Acres,” or beyond a “Sinister Barrier.” With their improved eyesight, they saw the world was owned by blue globules, called Vitons, owned humans the way ranchers own cattle. The book was thoroughly Fortean, beginning with a series of news clippings, a la Fort, a trope that recurs later in the book, when there are presented more than a century of clippings that are evidence of the Vitons’ existence. The case of the spiritual adept Daniel Dunglass Home is roped into the story, as is the Fortean stalwart Kasper Hauser. (Home was part Viton; Hauser was created in a Viton lab.) the crew of the Marie Celeste and Amelia Earhart (herself the subject of the first article int he first edition of Thayer’s Fortean Society magazine) were snatched by Vitons. At one point in the novel, the New York Herald Tribune published a history of the Vitons with 20,000 references culled from 400 issues of Thayer’s magazine. Fort was quoted directly, not just the line about property, but about measuring existence by frogs, and the Vitons were imagined as fish in an atmospheric ocean, feeding on humans, who inhabited the bottom—a variation on another Fortean theme.
Campbell did not like Russell’s original draft of the story. Russell noted his first vision for the tale “was completely Fortean, turning humanity into creatures of little consequence from the cosmic point of view and leaving them to be saved, for what they were worth, by greater and higher life from elsewhere. It was a downbeat story that Fort might have approved with satisfactory guffaws. In my happy ignorance I did not know that selling Terra short was anathema to John Campbell.” Campbell sent it back, and Russell worked hard to revise it, having the humans discover a way to defeat the Vitons. In my opinion, the second half of the novel, as it was published, does not work as well as the first. But science fiction fans lapped it up.
“Sinister Barrier,” as the novel was retitled, started its serialization March 1939 issue of “Unknown”—the debut of a new magazine with which Campbell hoped to do for fantasy what he had done for science fiction in “Astounding,” making it more respectable, more literary, more logical. Russell’s story so seemed to embody these traits that a rumor grew up insisting the magazine had been created specifically for Russell’s story. That wasn’t true, but “Sinister Barrier” did levitate Russell among the science fiction greats. Moskowitz notes, “The reader approbation given the story turned Eric Frank Russell into a major science fiction figure overnight. Beyond that it was the major breakthrough for popularization of Fortean material in science fiction. A significant part of the stories in Unknown could thenceforth contain a Fortean flavor.”
Russell’s reputation was helped by a trip he funded with the proceeds of the novel’s sale. He came to America in late April 1939, just as his story was appearing in “Unknown,” and made the rounds among science fiction fans, writers, and editors. It is likely that he also met Tiffany Thayer during this trip, cementing his connection to the Fortean Society. On the trip, he met Edmond Hamilton, a science fiction writer, who had corresponded with Fort. Indeed, Hamilton had written a story “The Earth Owners,” which took as its starting point the same Fortean line as Russell had—and plowed the field in similar ways. Russell had likely read Hamilton, but neither thought that he had plagiarized, even if some fans did. Hamilton gave Russell a piece with Fort’s handwriting, and a copy of the one Fort book Russell had thus been unable to find, “New Lands.”
By this point, Russell was deeply involved with the Fortean Society, no more a regional correspondent, but rather a towering figure in the Society. He handled not only British membership, but pretty much all non-American members (given the difficulty of exchanging money in America, a situation that would only grow worse with the onset of World War II). He also sent in loads and loads of clippings, such that huge swaths of the magazine were composed of material he had provided. Many of the issues had columns devoted to Russell’s contributions, but these hardly exhausted them, and they were still sprinkled throughout the magazine. He also kept up a regular correspondence with Thayer, one that would grow to include a number of prominent Forteans, including Judith L. Gee.
At the same time, he was evangelizing Fortean ideas throughout the science fiction community, and, in time, in more occultist publications, as well, his strict rationalism now replaced by a cynical skepticism that measured the world against his own prejudices and usually found the planet wanting. He wrote articles and letters, setting his markers on the Fortean perspective and arguing against those who insisted otherwise. These appeared in “Unknown” and “New Frontiers” and “The Fantast” and “Tomorrow” and the ‘zine “Futurian War Digest” from 1939 to 1941. At that point, the war intervened, and his writing slowed (though he continued to make personal appearances at fan gatherings); his work for Thayer was also interrupted, taken over to a large extent by Russell’s wife, and by the Fortean Tom Elsender.
“Over the Border” appeared in the September 1939 issue of “Unknown.” It was largely a non-fictional consideration of the same themes that Russell had explored in “Sinister Barrier,” even using the same metaphors. There was a barrier to human thought and human senses, beyond which lie strange, literally unimaginable things—though they do become visible to those willing to vault the barrier. Russell then marshaled various clippings he had gathered in 1938 to suggest—in a Fortean way—that aquatic visitors were coming from Venus—which explains news accounts of mystery planes seen crashing into the ocean, despite there being no evidence of missing planes, or wreckage found. He plays with the idea that reports of mysterious objects leaving the ocean are the extra-mundane crafts, and quakes and strange noises might be caused by underwater Venusian mining.
The language of the article was different than that of the novel, less wise-cracking, more Fortean, though his aping could be want. It is our quaint notion of logic that a thing which is not an air machine is something else,” he says at one point. And: “We would not make ourselves Galileos on the strength of a distant candle.” The structure is Fortean, too, with him introducing a sub-topic—say mysterious crafts entering the ocean, or strange noises and quakes—then following his remarks with a long list of news clippings. Other Forteans would take up the same topic—David Markham spent years arguing that Venusians were visiting earth and mining some substance from beneath the ocean, their comings and goings able to be plotted against astronomical cycles. His conclusion, too, was Fortean: scientists have often been wrong about matters, so why not consider this option. “We cling to the conceit that were can guess as well as any seismologist, but do it more shrewdly. What—seismologists don’t guess?” It is all a game, in the end, a Fortean lark: “Linking is our hobby. Millions link suspenders for the sake of physical decency. We link facts, and achieve intellectual decency.”
The following month, October 1939, an essay by Russell on Fort appeared in (the anti-Fortean) Harry Warner’s fanzine “Spaceways.” The essay was titled “Fort the Colossus.” Russell got started on a wrong foot, saying Fort was a man “small in stature, mighty mentally,” since, as Thayer would repeatedly say, Fort was over six-feet tall. He also highlighted Fort’s appearance in “Astounding,” though that had apparently had no effect on Russell himself, even as he called it “an event rare in literary annals—the popularizing in the pulp magazine market of a veritable colossus.” (Here he was continuing the theme of his earlier classification of pulp as entertaining, not enlightening.) But then he rounded to his main point: he saw Fort continuing and expanding the secularizing project of the nineteenth-century skeptics. Fort “dared to place himself in the same relationship to dogmatic science as the late Colonel Robert Ingersoll stood to organized religion, and who, like Ingersoll, wielded an impressively vitriolic pen.”
The burden of the rest of the essay was to consider “him objectively and subjectively: as others saw him and as he viewed himself.” He gathered newspaper reports of Fort—how very meta!—as well as a long excerpt from “Vogue.” Following these mostly wryly admiring portraits, he listed Fort’s beliefs as he presented them in his books, his atheism, his attack on scientific dogma and unwillingness to believe anything, combined with his need to be heard. Russell mentioned Fort’s library-grubbing and the books he wrote, each of them “not only a reasoned exposition of Fortean philosophy, a wonderful mine of breath-taking ideas [as he well knew], a literary work of the highest calibre, but also a slashing attack upon dogmatic science.” There he then presented a long extract from “The Book of the Damned”—now two decades in the past and not so well known to science fiction fans anymore.
“New Lands,” the book it was hardest for Russell to come by, he describes as full of “theories, terrifyingly substantiated with endless data, that are of peculiar interest to all science fiction fans” who’ve been asked, How come the alines aren’t here, and to which Fort answered, they’ve been here, and may come again, but their presence has not been acknowledged because we are children in the presence of abstruse facts. (The same point Russell had made twice already.) Russell then pointed to vivid ideas in the various books, witches waging war, teleportation, that earth is gardened by aliens, and those who looked too far beyond sinister barriers were disappeared. Russell suggested—as did Howard Stephenson at about the same time—that Fort’s death may have been caused by a similarly obfuscating force.
Brushing aside (inevitable) questions about how seriously to take Fort and his philosophy—“eccentric” or “new messiah”—Russell insisted that Fort should be admired for his literary style. “Much of his work cannot be described as mere writing; it is sheer poetry, stark, terrifying, strangely fascinating.” There came next another long excerpt from “The Book of the Damned,” this time the opening lines. The article then ended quickly, with Fort’s former address, marriage, and friendship, and a plug for “the magazine that is Fort’s only memorial” in which “the parade of pallid data passes and passes and keeps on passing.”
Other parts of the fanzine balanced out what might be too sympathetic a hearing for Fort. The book review, written by Jack Chapman Miske, turned its attention to “Eric Frank Russell’s childish novel, ‘Sinister Barrier,’ in the first UNKNOWN” Miske, writing as “Star-Treader” (his column was “Star Dust,” dismissed the story as concerning “itself with blue balls of something or other which are invisible to Man and which rule his destiny, not to speak of warding off any possible extra-terrestrial visitors. The idea comes from Charles Fort, whose style Russell appropriated in writing the story.” Miske then hit Russell for the examples he used in his book of unsolved mysteries, arguing these were myths, legends, and rumors—ghost stories. (Ironically, he cites as a contrasting authority Abe Merritt, and his “The American Weekly,” which was a notoriously unreliable rag, and others said was the source of Fort’s tales. He also points to Ray Palmer’s “Amazing Stories” as another source disproving Fort’s wild claims.)
“Absurdity after absurdity, superstition after superstition,” Miske sniffed, before falling into a confusing hole of his own digging. According to the story, Miske notes, those who discover the true nature of Vitons are killed—but then Russell is writing a story about them. And yet he is in the United Staes, and alive. And more: “Unknown” just published another piece by Russell arguing that earth is continually visited by extra-terrestrials. “Tell this poor, bewildered one, Eric, sweet, don’t your two contentions contradict just a wee, little bit?” Weirdly, he capstoned the confusion with the very next section of the review: a poem praising Edmond Hamilton, who himself was influenced by Fort and wrote a story so very similar to “Sinister Barrier.”
Russell played along, to an extent, saying the story noted the Vitons’s system was breaking down, so there’s no contradiction in him reporting the story without being killed. As for Fort being debunked—some have been, sire, but not all of them, and so Star Treader had to select the few that were questioned. (And even so, two issues later “Spaceways” printed another letter from Russell, this one an excerpt from Ray Palmer and “Amazing Stories” suggesting that not only was the story of the Marie Celeste true, but part of a broader pattern; that’s what you get, relying too much on Palmer’s consistency.) Russell denied trying to copy Fort’s style—“Boy, don’t I wish I could”—but that only held true for “Sinister Barrier.” His essay “Fort the Colossus” showed that he was fascinated by Fort’s voice, and his essay for “Unknown” clearly tried to emulate it.
There was more Fortean jousting in letter columns in 1940 and 1941. January 1940 saw a letter Russell wrote appear in “Unknown.” He was irritated by a line in an article that L. Sprague DeCamp had written yoga: “the utter worthlessness of introspection as a method of finding out what is and what isn’t.” Russell pointed out that introspection was central to Confucius’s thought, and Confucius had argued “reciprocity” was the key to human civilization. But DeCamp preferred the scientific method, and, at the time of Russell’s writing, he and his family were “waiting patiently for the most scientific people on earth to blow us into bloody shreds by the most up-to-date scientific methods.” It was true that science had provided some goods, and helped to connect the world, but that was just the world “turn[ing] to Satan to cast out sin.” “The indisputable fact” was “that the world’s most scientific nations are the most uncivilized.” That wasn’t necessarily the fault of science or scientists “but it does suggest that the time is long overdue when science should go hand in hand with some useful introspection. It can be said in favor of navel-contemplators that they were never bomb droppers.” Russell’s piece wasn't exactly a Fortean inversion of scientific ideas, but definitely represented a skepticism of the scientific project.
Russell continued to walk this line—praising Fort, but leaving room to praise science, too, as long as it did not overstep its bounds—in a letter published in the September issue of “Unknown.” Willy Ley, the German rocket scientist, had published a brief essay on the unreliability of newspaper clippings—and, by implication, for Fort. Russell took offense for obvious reasons: Fort tried to verify what he could of the reports he collected, and maintained a strong skepticism about those reports as well as his own theories. “Unlike some scientists, he was never guilty of offering his theories as if they were established facts.” And newspaper clippings could be wrong—but plenty were correct, too. After all, he noted, Ley had published another article that relied on on journalistic accounts.
Russell presented the letter more in sadness than anger—“Much as I esteem him after our one never-to-be-forgotten meeting”—and thought “Wily’s faint antagonism to Fort” was “based on the belief that criticism of dishonesty in science is criticism of all science—though I have yet to find a Fortean who thinks all science dishonest.” He was trying to thread that needle again. And could point to scientists themselves—not Forteans even—who offered “the most serious and effective criticism of the most dogmatic side of science. He noted that Einstein (no favorite of Forteans) had come in for attacks by credentialed scientists. Meanwhile, J.B.S. Haldane criticized “scientists who behave like so many magicians, and try to prove that science is mysterious, and a great many who don’t want the ordinary man to know too much.” There was room in Russell’s vision of a good society for scientists, as long as they knew their place.
At the same time, Fort’s philosophy was working on some of Russell’s other cherished beliefs—he had let loose his tight grip on science, and was in the process of doing the same with regards to religion. The fanzine “Fantast” had run an atheist’s creed, prompting a response from Russell: “Turner's creed bit interested me—I’d like to argue with him in a boozer some time. Forteanishly, I am a hyper-atheist, and thus think that atheists are merely Roman catholics walking on their hands. A choice subject, this, and one well calculated to start some bottle-busting over sundry nuts, with a general riot to end the evening.” What Fortean relativism did not touch, though, were his racial prejudices. Russell approved of Chinese philosophy, but could be downright mean-spirited when it came to Jews and Italians. His friends and Fortean acquaintances tried to point out how un-Fortean were his views, but they never seemed to budge him.
Amid these letters came another Fortean essay, “Spontaneous Frogation,” which appeared in the July 1940 issue of “Unknown”—itself becoming a hotbed for debates over Fort. (There had been Willy Ley, for example, and also a letter criticizing Russell’s earlier essay for being a wan retread of Fort, which asked, instead, that Fort’s earlier books be serialized.) It was a short piece, without any attempt to copy Fort’s style, and focused only on one small event, published in the Liverpool “Echo.” A colony of frogs mysteriously appeared on a tiny parcel of land in the center of an industrial district. How did they get there? Could they have fallen from the sky? If so, why only on that one spot? Did they escape from a collection, or hop through the city at night? If so, how did they negotiated the barriers—there’s that word again!—surrounding the parcel of land? Could frog spawn have been carried tot he spot on bird’s feet? Or teleportation?
To the extent that he had a perspective, Russell seemed to prefer another Fortean notion. Fort suggested that certain inventions came when the time was right: everyone knew about hot water and steam, and yet steam engines were not invented until it was the very end of the seventeenth century in Britain. Similarly, perhaps the suitability of this patch of land—undeveloped, “swampy, with a few small puddles here and there” a “midget haven of peace situated in the very heart of seventy square miles of brick, stone and concrete”—called forth the frogs: “life appears of its own accord, in shape to fit existing circumstances, and that this reptilian sanctuary is ground that has undergone ‘spontaneous frogation.’”
Or—perhaps not. Russell was enough of a Fortean not to take his speculations too seriously. It was the mystery of it all that moved him. Nobody knew whence the frogs came, but “astonished Liverpudlians know where the frogs are squatting. Singing their sage to the moon by night, surrounded by clattering street cars, yelling telephones, and hammering typewriters by day, these invaders from the unknown go about their own strange, froggish business.”
There was another Fortean essay, said to have been accepted by “Astounding” around May 1941, called “Astral Artillery.” But I do not believe that it ever appeared. And then the war intervened, cutting down the amount that Russell could write. There is also evidence that the war profoundly changed Russell’s outlook, his cynicism deepening, souring. Back in 1940, “Spaceways” had published a hopeful essay by him, that the sins of the Great War would not be repeated, that everyday people were waking up, and would stop the politicians from committing the world to yet another round of horrible bloodshed. Obviously, that hope was dashed.
It is also true that up until the 1940s, Russell was social, making the rounds through various scientific groups. That continued into the war, to an extent, with him organizing gatherings of science fiction fans. And an account from 1942:“Suddenly there was a ring at the door & Eric Frank Russell came out of the night. For the next 3 or 4 hours after that no-one could get a word in edgeways—Russell held the floor with accounts of his childhood in Egypt, his experiences in blitzes in Liverpool, his adventures at the New York World’s Fair & with the New York SF authors, Charles Fort, the Marie Celeste, the Maine, Wally Gillings in Liverpool & Blackpool and Lord knows what.” But these get-togethers seem to become rarer and rarer, Russell more isolated. He said that his best friend was Frederick Shroyer, who lived in Los Angeles, and whom he knew entirely through correspondence—surely a sign of isolation.
Sam Youd, a British science fiction writer and friend, caught a key aspect of Russell, even as he tried to do so jokingly: “The perverseness of John is his salient feature (always excluding his jaw), and the only point of similarity between him and Eric Russell. Both have reverted to Roman Catholic science, and constructed the universe about the Betelgeuse of their egos, both have grown so used to sneering at the face of authority that they dare no longer look in a mirror.” Not unlike another Fortean fantasist, Richard Matheson, Russell’s fiction came to focus on lone male protagonists, arrayed agains the vast forces of the universe. One of his most famous novels is “Wasp,” which details how one man, using what was not yet called terrorist tactics and guerrilla warfare, took down an entire planet of hostiles.
Which isn’t to say that World War II—while changing Russell—completely stopped his writing. He did find new outlets, though. He started to appear int he magazine “Tomorrow,” associated with the publisher King, Littlewood & King, and which—after the war—would turn toward fascism and monarchism under the editorship of N. V. Dagg. He wrote a Fortean inflected essay (unseen by me) titled “World Invasion,” for the August 1941 issue, as an example. And a review of the new omnibus Fort (also unseen by me). King, Littlewood & King were also trying to get the omnibus into Britian, which was difficult with paper and import restrictions. Russell let science fiction fans know of the problems, and to be patient, in a blurb for the fanzine “Futurian War Digest”:
"It is very doubtful whether any individual reader in this country will be able to obtain the book from USA, owing to the restrictions on the export of cash. Anyway I've taken the steps necessary to make the book available to British readers ... Import licences can be got by bona fide publishers, so I'm arranging for a number of copies to be imported and distributed on behalf of the Fortean Society by King, Littlewood & King Ltd. of Fishery Rd., Bray, Berks. These people are publishers of books and magazines and - directly they've obtained supplies - will be advertising the omnibus in their sixpenny monthly TOMORROW, also running a fairly long review of the book written by me.
Should this method fail, it may be possible to arrange for a British reprint to be marketed.”
The post-War years saw Russell return to writing at a—for him—prodigious clip. He was a professional, and less interested in fandom, but he did still appear in some fanzines and smaller publications. The second issue of Sam Youd’s short-lived “New Frontiers” reprinted Russell’s “Fort the Colossus.” An otherwise undated 1948 issue of James Blish’s fanzine “Tumbrils” (number 15), published Russell’s Fortean essay “How High the Sky.” In it, he broke with the enthusiasm of the British Interplanetary Society, dismissing attempts to rocket to the moon as “uncomfortably orthodox.” Why bother?, Russell wanted to know. The moon was a cold, lonely rock in space, “too uninhabited to be seduced by gin and missionaries, too uninhabitable to be developed by the brawn of dopes and the brains of smarties.” But then, in the Fortean spirit, he noted the musings of two renegade Italian astronomers, who suggested that the moon was closer than thought, and perhaps even inhabited by some lost group of humans who had realized this fact and colonized the satellite long ago. (Blish ran it, but annotated the essay with surly footnotes.)
In 1948, Fantasy Press put out a new edition of “Sinister Barrier.” By the reckoning of Peter Phillips, reviewing the book for Walter Gillings’s “Fantasy Review,” sales of the novel in its various forms "now promise to exceed the quarter-million mark.” Phillips, liked Star-Treader before him, wasn’t a huge fan of the Fortean trappings, nor Russell’s seeming claim that the story was true in some sense (or based on facts), and wanted to argue metaphysics. But he could not argue with the story itself, which he thought slick and engaging, though perhaps too slick and not introspective enough. Thayer had a different view of the matter, when he announced the republication in “Doubt”: “Russell’s book which went out of print because Moloch demanded the paper is again available. Newcomers to the Fortean fold should know that the novel is a fantasy, inspired in part by Fort’s suggestion that we are property.” In 1953, yet another edition of the book would be put out, this one by a press associated with he science fiction magazine “Galaxy”—irritating Campbell to no end, since he thought a competitor was profiting off of him.
The year 1948 also saw yet another Russell essay on Fort, this one in Gillings’s “Fantasy Review” (volume 2.10, Aug-Sep), titled “Charles Fort—The Bronx Jeer.” Russell began in a conciliatory tone:
“Which one of the bygone names exerted the most potent effect upon modern fantasy is a question any band of old-time fans could debate until the crack of doom; for the respective statures of great penman are measured not in inches of lineal inches marking but in years of reader-esteem. To each reader his own measure, to each his own colossus. It would ill-become any of us to deny another his personal yardstick with which to estimate the worth of this, that or the other author, living or dead. If this appears to contradict lurid comments of mine made many years ago, accept that I am now cured, or half-cured, or on the way to recovery.
“By my yardstick—which I have no reason to suppose is more or less accurate than anyone else’s—the late Charles Fort was enough of a titan to influence pulp fantasy as much as any other writer, and possibly more than most. . . . Here I am disregarding Fort’s philosophy of determined scepticism and his ethic of temporary acceptance, looking at him only as one of the fantasy-forces discernible to-day.”
Russell noticed that Fort’s influence on fantastic fiction was different than most of the greats—Abe Merritt or Lovecraft and their ilk. No one was aping Fort’s style—with the possible exception of Russell’s essay for “Unknown”—but rather, it was to his ideas that writers turned: “He had a mind of such astounding imaginative scope and fertility that he could think up plots faster than the average author can spit.” Russell noted that Campbell himself had recommended Fort as a sourcebook in his review of the omnibus edition. And he himself presented a long quote from “Lo!” that he thought full of possible story ideas: important for pulp fictioneers, who survived on turning out a great deal of copy in a short period of time, and who therefore had no tolerance for writer’s block. He pointed out some of the more famous examples of Fortean fiction, but also that the end was nowhere near: “Fort marches on, the giant behind half a hundred narratives, with plenty more to come.” He ended with more culling of plot ideas from Fort’s books. “How long that shadow a giant casts! See what I mean?”
All this while, Russell continued to plow away for the Fortean Society, continuing to handle menial administrative tasks, and send in loads of material. He kept up a huge correspondence with Forteans, even continuing discussions with people Thayer told him were too strange to bother with. He published essays and advertisements for the Society in the British periodical “Tomorrow.” (A number of British Forteans found their way to the Society from that magazine.) He took up his pen to defend Ezra Pound against criticism from the likes of Lilith Lorraine and Stanton Coblentz; he razed an astronomer who named a new star after himself—said sat being notable for how dense it was. He contributed epigrams, admitting he was “a sucker for the subtlety of Chinese humor, such as their ancient curse: ‘May you live in interesting times!’ I like Chinese comments, such as:
“‘After three days a guest stinks.’
“‘Inferior pigs forage over the hill.’
“‘Everyone pushes a falling fence.’
“‘Keep your hearts together--and your huts apart.’
“‘Two proud men cannot ride upon one ass.’
“Some of these are as old as time, so old that they’ve been attributed to others. A nice Fortean one, for example, is now credited to the Arabs: ‘The dogs barks, but the caravan passes on.’ A crack aimed at me by a Spanish friend was traced by me back to the Moors, thence to the Chinese: ‘Let the foreign devils work—they are more advanced!’”
Moskowitz, writing about Russell’s career after his writing had mostly stopped, claimed, “Russell himself stayed pretty much away from the Fortean notions in his later fiction because he feared duplication of the charge brought against him that Sinister Barrier had been a deliberate remake of Hamilton’s The Earth Owners.” Russell offered some support for this contention himself, in his essay on Fort the fantasist for “Fantasy Review”: “These days,” he wrote in 1948, “I get leery of [Fort’s] plots and am more and more inclined to leave them alone, fearing duplication of ideas”—which seemed to be a subtle acknowledgment of the similarities between “Sinister Barrier” and Hamilton’s story.
But the evidence is not so clear: Fort may have wormed himself so deeply into Russell’s mind that he could not help but turn out Fortean stories, and Moskowitz may have been so irritated by Fort that he refused to see the Fortean influence on Russell (and science fiction more generally). To be sure, not all of the Fortean stories Russell wrote were directly inspired by Fort; some took up the ideas of the Fortean Society, especially opposition to war and vivisection, but still, they show that Russell was not so adrift from Fort. Not long after “Sinister Barrier,” he published “Homo Saps” in Astounding (December 1941). There were also the Fortean flavored stories that came out even after his essay in “Fantasy Review”: “Late Night Final” (december 1948); “Afternoon of a Fahn” (April 1951); “And Then There Were None” (June 1951); “Asstronomy” (July 1955); “Three to Conquer” (August-October 1955); “Into Your Tent I’ll Creep” (September 1957); and “Stargazers” (January 1959). He also published some stories with Ray Palmer’s magazines, suggesting a Fortean meeting of the minds.
What may have motivated Russell to disavow getting any more plot ideas from Fort was that, when his essay appeared, the serialization of his latest novel had just finished, and it was decidedly Fortean: perhaps he was trying to clear the way to new science fictional fields. That story was “Dreadful Sanctuary,” rooted in the Fortean notion that earth was the asylum for the universe’s insane and revolving around the question, How does one know one is sane. Russell himself had come to answer the question negatively. As he told Campbell, “I don’t claim . . . that I know I’m sane. This gives me an immense advantage in debate; I can ignore all logic, be totally destructive, and enjoy the freedom of the undeniably batty.” Russell had come along way from his days of rationalism. Ingersoll was way in the background now.
“Dreadful Sanctuary” also started as a Fortean mystery, though in this case the question wasn’t who is killing scientists, but who is killing rockets: why do they keep exploding before they reach Venus? The very first page of the book is very reminiscent of Thayer, suggesting that public opinion is manipulated by elites for their own ends, silly stories distracting from the waste of taxpayer money, for example. There are also references to Korzybski’s General Semantics, which overlapped with Fort in some ways, and raised the question of how one maintained sanity in a world saturated with propaganda. Deeper references, too, such as the purplish admonition to “cherchez la femme,” which Thayer had appropriated to Fortean ends, and Russell stole back for his pulp. And Kasper Hauser was there.
The exploding rockets are caused by competing cultists, who believe that earth is an insane asylum. Some of the cultists wants to keep humans earthbound to protect the other planets from the insane. (These cultists, belonging to the Norman Club, are themselves sane, having recovered overtime via evolution, and can prove their sanity with a test.) Other cultists work agains them, trying to get protect the rockets, so that humans can return to the planets of their birth and compel their parents to recognize them. As it turns out, both groups are wrong, and the conspiracy foiled, allowing two rockets to lift off, one of which reaches the moon. The novel was published complete by Fantasy Press in 1951, and again in 1963, though this one with a tragic conclusion, none of the rockets succeeding in the end.
Arthur C. Clarke nodded appreciatively at the twists in “Dreadful Sanctuary”: “Id’ rather suspected, as it turned out, that your extra-terrestrials would turn out to be phonies. You can regard this as a compliment: I knew you knew enough astronomy not to postulate huminoid [sic] Mercurians.” He thought the story strong for “plausibility” and “science”; and Thayer advertised the novel in “Doubt,” the Society providing it to members for $2.75. Russell continued to walk the line between limited respect for science and Fortean flippancy, while also, as the mood hit him, running from the lien and deep into one territory or the other. But even as Fortean (and Fortean Society) ideas continued to find their way into his fiction, a few years into the 1950s, and he was tiring of the Fortean Society itself—remarkably, as central a figure to Forteanism as he was, Russell also belonged to the class of Forteans who found the ideas more compelling in the 1940s, and dropped away with the new decade.
Part of the problem was Ben Hecht. One of the founders—indeed, the first disciple of Charles Fort, as it were—had taken out advertisements praising Jewish terrorists attacking British forces. Russell wanted Hecht tossed out of the Society, but Thayer refused, only writing a small criticism of Hecht in “Doubt.” Part of the problem seemed to be the large amounts of menial work. Thayer might also have been wearing on him some. Late in 1955, Thayer confronted Russell on the widening gulf between them. Russell dismissed it as nothing more than Thayer’s imagination, but Thayer thought there was more going on. He offered to take over the correspondence with foreign members, though he could not handle money: “Those blighters can’t send dough to me—dammit.”
As it happened, Thayer had recently had the opportunity to go back through Russell’s letters to him, from years before, and they were filled with ardor. Now? “Work, time and old age: aye: they are the culprits. They bear down on me too. If I had a young sprout I could trust I should be happy to turn over the Society to him. Alas, enthusiasm is not as durable as Gibraltar and most of the sparklers are flashes in the pan.” It was happening to everyone. Russell had commented on John Cowper Powys’s recent book, and Thayer thought it showed the same decrepitude. You know Powys is too old to do anything. The past ten of his more recent books are maundering. . . . O, well, we’ll limp along. I’ll swap you a wheel-chair for a pair of crutches.”
The differences really came to a head after the launch of Sputnik. Thayer devoted most of an issue to the subject, arguing that there was no way to know such a thing as Sputnik existed: all the reports were second or third-hand and mediated through fallible machines. It was just as likely a hoax. Russell, raised as he was on science and a veteran of the BIS, had reached his limit with skepticism. His letter to Thayer is lost, but it’s clear from Thayer’s response that Russell held nothing back. Indeed, the two drifted so far apart that when Thayer died in August 1959, of a heart attack, Russell was surprised to be moved by the loss.
And yet—there is always a yet in Fortean history. Because even as Russell was drifting away from the Fortean Society, he was composing his own Fortean book, and continuing to contemplate Fortean anomalies. The June 1957 issue of Campbell’s “Astounding” ran Russell’s article on the medium Eusapia Palladino, given the Galilean title “And Still It Moves.” At the same time, Campbell wanted Russell to do an article on levitation, and the possible scientific explanations for it. Russell was in a Fortean mood, working on “Great World Mysteries,” a book of Fortean mysteries that was published in 1957. Kirkus Reviews summarized it thusly:
“Here is a follower in the footsteps of the famous Charles Fort, collector of oddities, peculiar facts and unsolved mysteries, with a symposium of real-life facts covering a wide range of bafflers. Some are familiar, such as the Mary [Celeste] case; some have current interest as his Gadget in the Sky, embracing, of course, the flying saucers of today; some deal with strange personalities, such as the Kaspar Hauser case. But many of them have a flavor of psychic phenomena,—the mysterious footprints throughout Devon—and again in scattered areas; the moving coffins in Barbados, enclosed in a completely sealed vault, evidence of levitation, incontrovertibly witnessed over the years. Then there are natural history mysteries, the sea serpents, for instance. All in all there is wonderful material here, but Eric Russell, in underplaying the melodrama has—in some cases—deadened the interest.”
The levitation article never appeared in “Astounding.” Rather, various bits and pieces of the book (including the section on levitation) appeared in “Fantastic” magazine: creeping coffins (April), levitation (May), ships that vanished (June), and satan’s footprint (August).
Having gotten that out of his system, it was almost as though Russell had nothing more to say, though of course his health may have also caused him to set writing aside. He continued his correspondence, though sporadically, and was involved with some reprints and collections. He was encouraged to continue the Fortean Society, but refused, and refused, as well, efforts to re-engage him with the Fortean community. He was offered the chance to write a biography of Fort, but passed, and so the job went to the science fiction author Damon Knight. When Ron and Paul Willis were starting the International Fortean Organization, he was asked to enlist, but demurred, and downplayed the very idea of another Fortean organization.
There’s a sense—and I could be wrong, but the impression is there—that Russell, so extremely focused on his own self as the measure of the world, could not understand the desire of younger generations to keep moving on. He was done with fiction. And he was done with Fort. So should the rest of the world be.
Eric Frank Russell died 28 February 1978, aged 73.
**********************
Russell came to Fort twice, both times through science fiction, though only the second one taking, apparently. In August 1934, he wrote to the British Interplanetary Society—founded by the anti-Fortean P. E. Cleator the previous year—Russell apparently interested in the idea of interplanetary communications, and considering writing something for the BIS on the subject. He considered himself a rationalist at the time, and had studied scientific subjects in college. A correspondence sprang up between Russell and the co-founder of the BIS, Leslie L. Johnson.
Russell was reading science fiction at this time, including “Astounding Stories,” which was then being edited by F. Orlin Tremaine, and would have seen the serialization of Fort’s “Lo!,” that ran in 1934. But it had no effect on him, or so he said. Still, Russell was intrigued by the idea of writing some science fiction of his own, and his first attempt, “Eternal Re-Diffusion,” was based on an idea given to him by Johnson; Tremaine rejected it.
British science fiction overlapped with the BIS to a great extent at this time. Walter Gillings, who would be a hub of science fiction in England, became associated with the BIS at about the same time as Russell, and Russell would move into science fiction fandom that Gillings helped to organize; meanwhile, Russell and Johnson visited Olaf Stapledon and introduced him to both science fiction fandom and the BIS. In 1936, Russell and Johnson left Liverpool to visit science fiction fans in London, including Gillings, helping to knit together the network of British fandom; World War II would set back the movement to a great degree, though there continued to be meetings, but it was out of this network that post-War British fandom was reborn. In time, Russell would come to resent fans, and their demands and cheapskate ways—using libraries and second-hand bookstores and swapping stories, depriving him of royalties—but at the time he was fully immersed in the culture.
It was while haunting a second-hand bookstore during the middle 1930s that Russell came across Fort for the second time. He discovered the Gollancz edition of Fort’s “Lo!,” and was enraptured—it was the start of a move decidedly away from rationalism. He started hunting Fort’s other works, finding a copy of his only novel, “The Outcast Manufacturers,” and then “Book of the Damned” and “Wild Talents,” for which he paid exorbitant amounts. He also must have reached out to Tiffany Thayer in regards to the Fortean Society, because when the first issue of the Society’s magazine appeared, in September 1937, he was listed as a regional correspondent. As it happens, he was the only one of the dozen who had any continued interest in the Fortean Society—and, boy, what interest he had!
Russell sold his first science fiction story, “The Saga of Pelican West,” in 1937, and followed this with three more sales, all to Tremaine. When Tremaine was replaced as editor of Astounding by John W. Campbell, though, Russell found it harder to make sales (according to Sam Moskowitz). Campbell had very specific ideas about what counted as science fiction, and Robert Heinlein also went through a similar difficulty trying to calibrate stories to Campbell’s prejudices. Moskowitz says that, in desperation, Russell flipped through Fort’s books looking for an idea. (One is reminded of the apocryphal story, reported by H. Allen Smith, that Hecht prized Fort because he gave hm a story idea that levered him out of hock.) “I think we’re property,” Fort had written, and this gave Russell an idea.
He wrote a novel, in his spare time, called “Forbidden Acres,” based around this notion. Russell was working out his own ideas of science fiction in the pulp mode. He told readers of the British science fiction magazine “Tomorrow” that authors such as Stapledon and Fort educated and made audiences think hard; that was not pulp’s forte. Rather, the pulp author should seek to entertain—story was more important than scientific plausibility, he would say, another step away from rationalism—but that meant pulp authors needed to do more than plot. Plot was all anyone focused on. Writers for the pulp market also needed to focus on characterization and style, to make the story come alive. He himself was endeavoring to texture his stories, borrowing especially from the American crime pulps, with their wise-cracking heroes, and that was the case with “Forbidden Acres,” too.
“Forbidden Acres” started as a murder mystery, of sorts, with the mysterious deaths of a number of scientists. As the story evolved, it became clear that they had discovered a way to see beyond the usual edge of the human visual spectrum—to the “Forbidden Acres,” or beyond a “Sinister Barrier.” With their improved eyesight, they saw the world was owned by blue globules, called Vitons, owned humans the way ranchers own cattle. The book was thoroughly Fortean, beginning with a series of news clippings, a la Fort, a trope that recurs later in the book, when there are presented more than a century of clippings that are evidence of the Vitons’ existence. The case of the spiritual adept Daniel Dunglass Home is roped into the story, as is the Fortean stalwart Kasper Hauser. (Home was part Viton; Hauser was created in a Viton lab.) the crew of the Marie Celeste and Amelia Earhart (herself the subject of the first article int he first edition of Thayer’s Fortean Society magazine) were snatched by Vitons. At one point in the novel, the New York Herald Tribune published a history of the Vitons with 20,000 references culled from 400 issues of Thayer’s magazine. Fort was quoted directly, not just the line about property, but about measuring existence by frogs, and the Vitons were imagined as fish in an atmospheric ocean, feeding on humans, who inhabited the bottom—a variation on another Fortean theme.
Campbell did not like Russell’s original draft of the story. Russell noted his first vision for the tale “was completely Fortean, turning humanity into creatures of little consequence from the cosmic point of view and leaving them to be saved, for what they were worth, by greater and higher life from elsewhere. It was a downbeat story that Fort might have approved with satisfactory guffaws. In my happy ignorance I did not know that selling Terra short was anathema to John Campbell.” Campbell sent it back, and Russell worked hard to revise it, having the humans discover a way to defeat the Vitons. In my opinion, the second half of the novel, as it was published, does not work as well as the first. But science fiction fans lapped it up.
“Sinister Barrier,” as the novel was retitled, started its serialization March 1939 issue of “Unknown”—the debut of a new magazine with which Campbell hoped to do for fantasy what he had done for science fiction in “Astounding,” making it more respectable, more literary, more logical. Russell’s story so seemed to embody these traits that a rumor grew up insisting the magazine had been created specifically for Russell’s story. That wasn’t true, but “Sinister Barrier” did levitate Russell among the science fiction greats. Moskowitz notes, “The reader approbation given the story turned Eric Frank Russell into a major science fiction figure overnight. Beyond that it was the major breakthrough for popularization of Fortean material in science fiction. A significant part of the stories in Unknown could thenceforth contain a Fortean flavor.”
Russell’s reputation was helped by a trip he funded with the proceeds of the novel’s sale. He came to America in late April 1939, just as his story was appearing in “Unknown,” and made the rounds among science fiction fans, writers, and editors. It is likely that he also met Tiffany Thayer during this trip, cementing his connection to the Fortean Society. On the trip, he met Edmond Hamilton, a science fiction writer, who had corresponded with Fort. Indeed, Hamilton had written a story “The Earth Owners,” which took as its starting point the same Fortean line as Russell had—and plowed the field in similar ways. Russell had likely read Hamilton, but neither thought that he had plagiarized, even if some fans did. Hamilton gave Russell a piece with Fort’s handwriting, and a copy of the one Fort book Russell had thus been unable to find, “New Lands.”
By this point, Russell was deeply involved with the Fortean Society, no more a regional correspondent, but rather a towering figure in the Society. He handled not only British membership, but pretty much all non-American members (given the difficulty of exchanging money in America, a situation that would only grow worse with the onset of World War II). He also sent in loads and loads of clippings, such that huge swaths of the magazine were composed of material he had provided. Many of the issues had columns devoted to Russell’s contributions, but these hardly exhausted them, and they were still sprinkled throughout the magazine. He also kept up a regular correspondence with Thayer, one that would grow to include a number of prominent Forteans, including Judith L. Gee.
At the same time, he was evangelizing Fortean ideas throughout the science fiction community, and, in time, in more occultist publications, as well, his strict rationalism now replaced by a cynical skepticism that measured the world against his own prejudices and usually found the planet wanting. He wrote articles and letters, setting his markers on the Fortean perspective and arguing against those who insisted otherwise. These appeared in “Unknown” and “New Frontiers” and “The Fantast” and “Tomorrow” and the ‘zine “Futurian War Digest” from 1939 to 1941. At that point, the war intervened, and his writing slowed (though he continued to make personal appearances at fan gatherings); his work for Thayer was also interrupted, taken over to a large extent by Russell’s wife, and by the Fortean Tom Elsender.
“Over the Border” appeared in the September 1939 issue of “Unknown.” It was largely a non-fictional consideration of the same themes that Russell had explored in “Sinister Barrier,” even using the same metaphors. There was a barrier to human thought and human senses, beyond which lie strange, literally unimaginable things—though they do become visible to those willing to vault the barrier. Russell then marshaled various clippings he had gathered in 1938 to suggest—in a Fortean way—that aquatic visitors were coming from Venus—which explains news accounts of mystery planes seen crashing into the ocean, despite there being no evidence of missing planes, or wreckage found. He plays with the idea that reports of mysterious objects leaving the ocean are the extra-mundane crafts, and quakes and strange noises might be caused by underwater Venusian mining.
The language of the article was different than that of the novel, less wise-cracking, more Fortean, though his aping could be want. It is our quaint notion of logic that a thing which is not an air machine is something else,” he says at one point. And: “We would not make ourselves Galileos on the strength of a distant candle.” The structure is Fortean, too, with him introducing a sub-topic—say mysterious crafts entering the ocean, or strange noises and quakes—then following his remarks with a long list of news clippings. Other Forteans would take up the same topic—David Markham spent years arguing that Venusians were visiting earth and mining some substance from beneath the ocean, their comings and goings able to be plotted against astronomical cycles. His conclusion, too, was Fortean: scientists have often been wrong about matters, so why not consider this option. “We cling to the conceit that were can guess as well as any seismologist, but do it more shrewdly. What—seismologists don’t guess?” It is all a game, in the end, a Fortean lark: “Linking is our hobby. Millions link suspenders for the sake of physical decency. We link facts, and achieve intellectual decency.”
The following month, October 1939, an essay by Russell on Fort appeared in (the anti-Fortean) Harry Warner’s fanzine “Spaceways.” The essay was titled “Fort the Colossus.” Russell got started on a wrong foot, saying Fort was a man “small in stature, mighty mentally,” since, as Thayer would repeatedly say, Fort was over six-feet tall. He also highlighted Fort’s appearance in “Astounding,” though that had apparently had no effect on Russell himself, even as he called it “an event rare in literary annals—the popularizing in the pulp magazine market of a veritable colossus.” (Here he was continuing the theme of his earlier classification of pulp as entertaining, not enlightening.) But then he rounded to his main point: he saw Fort continuing and expanding the secularizing project of the nineteenth-century skeptics. Fort “dared to place himself in the same relationship to dogmatic science as the late Colonel Robert Ingersoll stood to organized religion, and who, like Ingersoll, wielded an impressively vitriolic pen.”
The burden of the rest of the essay was to consider “him objectively and subjectively: as others saw him and as he viewed himself.” He gathered newspaper reports of Fort—how very meta!—as well as a long excerpt from “Vogue.” Following these mostly wryly admiring portraits, he listed Fort’s beliefs as he presented them in his books, his atheism, his attack on scientific dogma and unwillingness to believe anything, combined with his need to be heard. Russell mentioned Fort’s library-grubbing and the books he wrote, each of them “not only a reasoned exposition of Fortean philosophy, a wonderful mine of breath-taking ideas [as he well knew], a literary work of the highest calibre, but also a slashing attack upon dogmatic science.” There he then presented a long extract from “The Book of the Damned”—now two decades in the past and not so well known to science fiction fans anymore.
“New Lands,” the book it was hardest for Russell to come by, he describes as full of “theories, terrifyingly substantiated with endless data, that are of peculiar interest to all science fiction fans” who’ve been asked, How come the alines aren’t here, and to which Fort answered, they’ve been here, and may come again, but their presence has not been acknowledged because we are children in the presence of abstruse facts. (The same point Russell had made twice already.) Russell then pointed to vivid ideas in the various books, witches waging war, teleportation, that earth is gardened by aliens, and those who looked too far beyond sinister barriers were disappeared. Russell suggested—as did Howard Stephenson at about the same time—that Fort’s death may have been caused by a similarly obfuscating force.
Brushing aside (inevitable) questions about how seriously to take Fort and his philosophy—“eccentric” or “new messiah”—Russell insisted that Fort should be admired for his literary style. “Much of his work cannot be described as mere writing; it is sheer poetry, stark, terrifying, strangely fascinating.” There came next another long excerpt from “The Book of the Damned,” this time the opening lines. The article then ended quickly, with Fort’s former address, marriage, and friendship, and a plug for “the magazine that is Fort’s only memorial” in which “the parade of pallid data passes and passes and keeps on passing.”
Other parts of the fanzine balanced out what might be too sympathetic a hearing for Fort. The book review, written by Jack Chapman Miske, turned its attention to “Eric Frank Russell’s childish novel, ‘Sinister Barrier,’ in the first UNKNOWN” Miske, writing as “Star-Treader” (his column was “Star Dust,” dismissed the story as concerning “itself with blue balls of something or other which are invisible to Man and which rule his destiny, not to speak of warding off any possible extra-terrestrial visitors. The idea comes from Charles Fort, whose style Russell appropriated in writing the story.” Miske then hit Russell for the examples he used in his book of unsolved mysteries, arguing these were myths, legends, and rumors—ghost stories. (Ironically, he cites as a contrasting authority Abe Merritt, and his “The American Weekly,” which was a notoriously unreliable rag, and others said was the source of Fort’s tales. He also points to Ray Palmer’s “Amazing Stories” as another source disproving Fort’s wild claims.)
“Absurdity after absurdity, superstition after superstition,” Miske sniffed, before falling into a confusing hole of his own digging. According to the story, Miske notes, those who discover the true nature of Vitons are killed—but then Russell is writing a story about them. And yet he is in the United Staes, and alive. And more: “Unknown” just published another piece by Russell arguing that earth is continually visited by extra-terrestrials. “Tell this poor, bewildered one, Eric, sweet, don’t your two contentions contradict just a wee, little bit?” Weirdly, he capstoned the confusion with the very next section of the review: a poem praising Edmond Hamilton, who himself was influenced by Fort and wrote a story so very similar to “Sinister Barrier.”
Russell played along, to an extent, saying the story noted the Vitons’s system was breaking down, so there’s no contradiction in him reporting the story without being killed. As for Fort being debunked—some have been, sire, but not all of them, and so Star Treader had to select the few that were questioned. (And even so, two issues later “Spaceways” printed another letter from Russell, this one an excerpt from Ray Palmer and “Amazing Stories” suggesting that not only was the story of the Marie Celeste true, but part of a broader pattern; that’s what you get, relying too much on Palmer’s consistency.) Russell denied trying to copy Fort’s style—“Boy, don’t I wish I could”—but that only held true for “Sinister Barrier.” His essay “Fort the Colossus” showed that he was fascinated by Fort’s voice, and his essay for “Unknown” clearly tried to emulate it.
There was more Fortean jousting in letter columns in 1940 and 1941. January 1940 saw a letter Russell wrote appear in “Unknown.” He was irritated by a line in an article that L. Sprague DeCamp had written yoga: “the utter worthlessness of introspection as a method of finding out what is and what isn’t.” Russell pointed out that introspection was central to Confucius’s thought, and Confucius had argued “reciprocity” was the key to human civilization. But DeCamp preferred the scientific method, and, at the time of Russell’s writing, he and his family were “waiting patiently for the most scientific people on earth to blow us into bloody shreds by the most up-to-date scientific methods.” It was true that science had provided some goods, and helped to connect the world, but that was just the world “turn[ing] to Satan to cast out sin.” “The indisputable fact” was “that the world’s most scientific nations are the most uncivilized.” That wasn’t necessarily the fault of science or scientists “but it does suggest that the time is long overdue when science should go hand in hand with some useful introspection. It can be said in favor of navel-contemplators that they were never bomb droppers.” Russell’s piece wasn't exactly a Fortean inversion of scientific ideas, but definitely represented a skepticism of the scientific project.
Russell continued to walk this line—praising Fort, but leaving room to praise science, too, as long as it did not overstep its bounds—in a letter published in the September issue of “Unknown.” Willy Ley, the German rocket scientist, had published a brief essay on the unreliability of newspaper clippings—and, by implication, for Fort. Russell took offense for obvious reasons: Fort tried to verify what he could of the reports he collected, and maintained a strong skepticism about those reports as well as his own theories. “Unlike some scientists, he was never guilty of offering his theories as if they were established facts.” And newspaper clippings could be wrong—but plenty were correct, too. After all, he noted, Ley had published another article that relied on on journalistic accounts.
Russell presented the letter more in sadness than anger—“Much as I esteem him after our one never-to-be-forgotten meeting”—and thought “Wily’s faint antagonism to Fort” was “based on the belief that criticism of dishonesty in science is criticism of all science—though I have yet to find a Fortean who thinks all science dishonest.” He was trying to thread that needle again. And could point to scientists themselves—not Forteans even—who offered “the most serious and effective criticism of the most dogmatic side of science. He noted that Einstein (no favorite of Forteans) had come in for attacks by credentialed scientists. Meanwhile, J.B.S. Haldane criticized “scientists who behave like so many magicians, and try to prove that science is mysterious, and a great many who don’t want the ordinary man to know too much.” There was room in Russell’s vision of a good society for scientists, as long as they knew their place.
At the same time, Fort’s philosophy was working on some of Russell’s other cherished beliefs—he had let loose his tight grip on science, and was in the process of doing the same with regards to religion. The fanzine “Fantast” had run an atheist’s creed, prompting a response from Russell: “Turner's creed bit interested me—I’d like to argue with him in a boozer some time. Forteanishly, I am a hyper-atheist, and thus think that atheists are merely Roman catholics walking on their hands. A choice subject, this, and one well calculated to start some bottle-busting over sundry nuts, with a general riot to end the evening.” What Fortean relativism did not touch, though, were his racial prejudices. Russell approved of Chinese philosophy, but could be downright mean-spirited when it came to Jews and Italians. His friends and Fortean acquaintances tried to point out how un-Fortean were his views, but they never seemed to budge him.
Amid these letters came another Fortean essay, “Spontaneous Frogation,” which appeared in the July 1940 issue of “Unknown”—itself becoming a hotbed for debates over Fort. (There had been Willy Ley, for example, and also a letter criticizing Russell’s earlier essay for being a wan retread of Fort, which asked, instead, that Fort’s earlier books be serialized.) It was a short piece, without any attempt to copy Fort’s style, and focused only on one small event, published in the Liverpool “Echo.” A colony of frogs mysteriously appeared on a tiny parcel of land in the center of an industrial district. How did they get there? Could they have fallen from the sky? If so, why only on that one spot? Did they escape from a collection, or hop through the city at night? If so, how did they negotiated the barriers—there’s that word again!—surrounding the parcel of land? Could frog spawn have been carried tot he spot on bird’s feet? Or teleportation?
To the extent that he had a perspective, Russell seemed to prefer another Fortean notion. Fort suggested that certain inventions came when the time was right: everyone knew about hot water and steam, and yet steam engines were not invented until it was the very end of the seventeenth century in Britain. Similarly, perhaps the suitability of this patch of land—undeveloped, “swampy, with a few small puddles here and there” a “midget haven of peace situated in the very heart of seventy square miles of brick, stone and concrete”—called forth the frogs: “life appears of its own accord, in shape to fit existing circumstances, and that this reptilian sanctuary is ground that has undergone ‘spontaneous frogation.’”
Or—perhaps not. Russell was enough of a Fortean not to take his speculations too seriously. It was the mystery of it all that moved him. Nobody knew whence the frogs came, but “astonished Liverpudlians know where the frogs are squatting. Singing their sage to the moon by night, surrounded by clattering street cars, yelling telephones, and hammering typewriters by day, these invaders from the unknown go about their own strange, froggish business.”
There was another Fortean essay, said to have been accepted by “Astounding” around May 1941, called “Astral Artillery.” But I do not believe that it ever appeared. And then the war intervened, cutting down the amount that Russell could write. There is also evidence that the war profoundly changed Russell’s outlook, his cynicism deepening, souring. Back in 1940, “Spaceways” had published a hopeful essay by him, that the sins of the Great War would not be repeated, that everyday people were waking up, and would stop the politicians from committing the world to yet another round of horrible bloodshed. Obviously, that hope was dashed.
It is also true that up until the 1940s, Russell was social, making the rounds through various scientific groups. That continued into the war, to an extent, with him organizing gatherings of science fiction fans. And an account from 1942:“Suddenly there was a ring at the door & Eric Frank Russell came out of the night. For the next 3 or 4 hours after that no-one could get a word in edgeways—Russell held the floor with accounts of his childhood in Egypt, his experiences in blitzes in Liverpool, his adventures at the New York World’s Fair & with the New York SF authors, Charles Fort, the Marie Celeste, the Maine, Wally Gillings in Liverpool & Blackpool and Lord knows what.” But these get-togethers seem to become rarer and rarer, Russell more isolated. He said that his best friend was Frederick Shroyer, who lived in Los Angeles, and whom he knew entirely through correspondence—surely a sign of isolation.
Sam Youd, a British science fiction writer and friend, caught a key aspect of Russell, even as he tried to do so jokingly: “The perverseness of John is his salient feature (always excluding his jaw), and the only point of similarity between him and Eric Russell. Both have reverted to Roman Catholic science, and constructed the universe about the Betelgeuse of their egos, both have grown so used to sneering at the face of authority that they dare no longer look in a mirror.” Not unlike another Fortean fantasist, Richard Matheson, Russell’s fiction came to focus on lone male protagonists, arrayed agains the vast forces of the universe. One of his most famous novels is “Wasp,” which details how one man, using what was not yet called terrorist tactics and guerrilla warfare, took down an entire planet of hostiles.
Which isn’t to say that World War II—while changing Russell—completely stopped his writing. He did find new outlets, though. He started to appear int he magazine “Tomorrow,” associated with the publisher King, Littlewood & King, and which—after the war—would turn toward fascism and monarchism under the editorship of N. V. Dagg. He wrote a Fortean inflected essay (unseen by me) titled “World Invasion,” for the August 1941 issue, as an example. And a review of the new omnibus Fort (also unseen by me). King, Littlewood & King were also trying to get the omnibus into Britian, which was difficult with paper and import restrictions. Russell let science fiction fans know of the problems, and to be patient, in a blurb for the fanzine “Futurian War Digest”:
"It is very doubtful whether any individual reader in this country will be able to obtain the book from USA, owing to the restrictions on the export of cash. Anyway I've taken the steps necessary to make the book available to British readers ... Import licences can be got by bona fide publishers, so I'm arranging for a number of copies to be imported and distributed on behalf of the Fortean Society by King, Littlewood & King Ltd. of Fishery Rd., Bray, Berks. These people are publishers of books and magazines and - directly they've obtained supplies - will be advertising the omnibus in their sixpenny monthly TOMORROW, also running a fairly long review of the book written by me.
Should this method fail, it may be possible to arrange for a British reprint to be marketed.”
The post-War years saw Russell return to writing at a—for him—prodigious clip. He was a professional, and less interested in fandom, but he did still appear in some fanzines and smaller publications. The second issue of Sam Youd’s short-lived “New Frontiers” reprinted Russell’s “Fort the Colossus.” An otherwise undated 1948 issue of James Blish’s fanzine “Tumbrils” (number 15), published Russell’s Fortean essay “How High the Sky.” In it, he broke with the enthusiasm of the British Interplanetary Society, dismissing attempts to rocket to the moon as “uncomfortably orthodox.” Why bother?, Russell wanted to know. The moon was a cold, lonely rock in space, “too uninhabited to be seduced by gin and missionaries, too uninhabitable to be developed by the brawn of dopes and the brains of smarties.” But then, in the Fortean spirit, he noted the musings of two renegade Italian astronomers, who suggested that the moon was closer than thought, and perhaps even inhabited by some lost group of humans who had realized this fact and colonized the satellite long ago. (Blish ran it, but annotated the essay with surly footnotes.)
In 1948, Fantasy Press put out a new edition of “Sinister Barrier.” By the reckoning of Peter Phillips, reviewing the book for Walter Gillings’s “Fantasy Review,” sales of the novel in its various forms "now promise to exceed the quarter-million mark.” Phillips, liked Star-Treader before him, wasn’t a huge fan of the Fortean trappings, nor Russell’s seeming claim that the story was true in some sense (or based on facts), and wanted to argue metaphysics. But he could not argue with the story itself, which he thought slick and engaging, though perhaps too slick and not introspective enough. Thayer had a different view of the matter, when he announced the republication in “Doubt”: “Russell’s book which went out of print because Moloch demanded the paper is again available. Newcomers to the Fortean fold should know that the novel is a fantasy, inspired in part by Fort’s suggestion that we are property.” In 1953, yet another edition of the book would be put out, this one by a press associated with he science fiction magazine “Galaxy”—irritating Campbell to no end, since he thought a competitor was profiting off of him.
The year 1948 also saw yet another Russell essay on Fort, this one in Gillings’s “Fantasy Review” (volume 2.10, Aug-Sep), titled “Charles Fort—The Bronx Jeer.” Russell began in a conciliatory tone:
“Which one of the bygone names exerted the most potent effect upon modern fantasy is a question any band of old-time fans could debate until the crack of doom; for the respective statures of great penman are measured not in inches of lineal inches marking but in years of reader-esteem. To each reader his own measure, to each his own colossus. It would ill-become any of us to deny another his personal yardstick with which to estimate the worth of this, that or the other author, living or dead. If this appears to contradict lurid comments of mine made many years ago, accept that I am now cured, or half-cured, or on the way to recovery.
“By my yardstick—which I have no reason to suppose is more or less accurate than anyone else’s—the late Charles Fort was enough of a titan to influence pulp fantasy as much as any other writer, and possibly more than most. . . . Here I am disregarding Fort’s philosophy of determined scepticism and his ethic of temporary acceptance, looking at him only as one of the fantasy-forces discernible to-day.”
Russell noticed that Fort’s influence on fantastic fiction was different than most of the greats—Abe Merritt or Lovecraft and their ilk. No one was aping Fort’s style—with the possible exception of Russell’s essay for “Unknown”—but rather, it was to his ideas that writers turned: “He had a mind of such astounding imaginative scope and fertility that he could think up plots faster than the average author can spit.” Russell noted that Campbell himself had recommended Fort as a sourcebook in his review of the omnibus edition. And he himself presented a long quote from “Lo!” that he thought full of possible story ideas: important for pulp fictioneers, who survived on turning out a great deal of copy in a short period of time, and who therefore had no tolerance for writer’s block. He pointed out some of the more famous examples of Fortean fiction, but also that the end was nowhere near: “Fort marches on, the giant behind half a hundred narratives, with plenty more to come.” He ended with more culling of plot ideas from Fort’s books. “How long that shadow a giant casts! See what I mean?”
All this while, Russell continued to plow away for the Fortean Society, continuing to handle menial administrative tasks, and send in loads of material. He kept up a huge correspondence with Forteans, even continuing discussions with people Thayer told him were too strange to bother with. He published essays and advertisements for the Society in the British periodical “Tomorrow.” (A number of British Forteans found their way to the Society from that magazine.) He took up his pen to defend Ezra Pound against criticism from the likes of Lilith Lorraine and Stanton Coblentz; he razed an astronomer who named a new star after himself—said sat being notable for how dense it was. He contributed epigrams, admitting he was “a sucker for the subtlety of Chinese humor, such as their ancient curse: ‘May you live in interesting times!’ I like Chinese comments, such as:
“‘After three days a guest stinks.’
“‘Inferior pigs forage over the hill.’
“‘Everyone pushes a falling fence.’
“‘Keep your hearts together--and your huts apart.’
“‘Two proud men cannot ride upon one ass.’
“Some of these are as old as time, so old that they’ve been attributed to others. A nice Fortean one, for example, is now credited to the Arabs: ‘The dogs barks, but the caravan passes on.’ A crack aimed at me by a Spanish friend was traced by me back to the Moors, thence to the Chinese: ‘Let the foreign devils work—they are more advanced!’”
Moskowitz, writing about Russell’s career after his writing had mostly stopped, claimed, “Russell himself stayed pretty much away from the Fortean notions in his later fiction because he feared duplication of the charge brought against him that Sinister Barrier had been a deliberate remake of Hamilton’s The Earth Owners.” Russell offered some support for this contention himself, in his essay on Fort the fantasist for “Fantasy Review”: “These days,” he wrote in 1948, “I get leery of [Fort’s] plots and am more and more inclined to leave them alone, fearing duplication of ideas”—which seemed to be a subtle acknowledgment of the similarities between “Sinister Barrier” and Hamilton’s story.
But the evidence is not so clear: Fort may have wormed himself so deeply into Russell’s mind that he could not help but turn out Fortean stories, and Moskowitz may have been so irritated by Fort that he refused to see the Fortean influence on Russell (and science fiction more generally). To be sure, not all of the Fortean stories Russell wrote were directly inspired by Fort; some took up the ideas of the Fortean Society, especially opposition to war and vivisection, but still, they show that Russell was not so adrift from Fort. Not long after “Sinister Barrier,” he published “Homo Saps” in Astounding (December 1941). There were also the Fortean flavored stories that came out even after his essay in “Fantasy Review”: “Late Night Final” (december 1948); “Afternoon of a Fahn” (April 1951); “And Then There Were None” (June 1951); “Asstronomy” (July 1955); “Three to Conquer” (August-October 1955); “Into Your Tent I’ll Creep” (September 1957); and “Stargazers” (January 1959). He also published some stories with Ray Palmer’s magazines, suggesting a Fortean meeting of the minds.
What may have motivated Russell to disavow getting any more plot ideas from Fort was that, when his essay appeared, the serialization of his latest novel had just finished, and it was decidedly Fortean: perhaps he was trying to clear the way to new science fictional fields. That story was “Dreadful Sanctuary,” rooted in the Fortean notion that earth was the asylum for the universe’s insane and revolving around the question, How does one know one is sane. Russell himself had come to answer the question negatively. As he told Campbell, “I don’t claim . . . that I know I’m sane. This gives me an immense advantage in debate; I can ignore all logic, be totally destructive, and enjoy the freedom of the undeniably batty.” Russell had come along way from his days of rationalism. Ingersoll was way in the background now.
“Dreadful Sanctuary” also started as a Fortean mystery, though in this case the question wasn’t who is killing scientists, but who is killing rockets: why do they keep exploding before they reach Venus? The very first page of the book is very reminiscent of Thayer, suggesting that public opinion is manipulated by elites for their own ends, silly stories distracting from the waste of taxpayer money, for example. There are also references to Korzybski’s General Semantics, which overlapped with Fort in some ways, and raised the question of how one maintained sanity in a world saturated with propaganda. Deeper references, too, such as the purplish admonition to “cherchez la femme,” which Thayer had appropriated to Fortean ends, and Russell stole back for his pulp. And Kasper Hauser was there.
The exploding rockets are caused by competing cultists, who believe that earth is an insane asylum. Some of the cultists wants to keep humans earthbound to protect the other planets from the insane. (These cultists, belonging to the Norman Club, are themselves sane, having recovered overtime via evolution, and can prove their sanity with a test.) Other cultists work agains them, trying to get protect the rockets, so that humans can return to the planets of their birth and compel their parents to recognize them. As it turns out, both groups are wrong, and the conspiracy foiled, allowing two rockets to lift off, one of which reaches the moon. The novel was published complete by Fantasy Press in 1951, and again in 1963, though this one with a tragic conclusion, none of the rockets succeeding in the end.
Arthur C. Clarke nodded appreciatively at the twists in “Dreadful Sanctuary”: “Id’ rather suspected, as it turned out, that your extra-terrestrials would turn out to be phonies. You can regard this as a compliment: I knew you knew enough astronomy not to postulate huminoid [sic] Mercurians.” He thought the story strong for “plausibility” and “science”; and Thayer advertised the novel in “Doubt,” the Society providing it to members for $2.75. Russell continued to walk the line between limited respect for science and Fortean flippancy, while also, as the mood hit him, running from the lien and deep into one territory or the other. But even as Fortean (and Fortean Society) ideas continued to find their way into his fiction, a few years into the 1950s, and he was tiring of the Fortean Society itself—remarkably, as central a figure to Forteanism as he was, Russell also belonged to the class of Forteans who found the ideas more compelling in the 1940s, and dropped away with the new decade.
Part of the problem was Ben Hecht. One of the founders—indeed, the first disciple of Charles Fort, as it were—had taken out advertisements praising Jewish terrorists attacking British forces. Russell wanted Hecht tossed out of the Society, but Thayer refused, only writing a small criticism of Hecht in “Doubt.” Part of the problem seemed to be the large amounts of menial work. Thayer might also have been wearing on him some. Late in 1955, Thayer confronted Russell on the widening gulf between them. Russell dismissed it as nothing more than Thayer’s imagination, but Thayer thought there was more going on. He offered to take over the correspondence with foreign members, though he could not handle money: “Those blighters can’t send dough to me—dammit.”
As it happened, Thayer had recently had the opportunity to go back through Russell’s letters to him, from years before, and they were filled with ardor. Now? “Work, time and old age: aye: they are the culprits. They bear down on me too. If I had a young sprout I could trust I should be happy to turn over the Society to him. Alas, enthusiasm is not as durable as Gibraltar and most of the sparklers are flashes in the pan.” It was happening to everyone. Russell had commented on John Cowper Powys’s recent book, and Thayer thought it showed the same decrepitude. You know Powys is too old to do anything. The past ten of his more recent books are maundering. . . . O, well, we’ll limp along. I’ll swap you a wheel-chair for a pair of crutches.”
The differences really came to a head after the launch of Sputnik. Thayer devoted most of an issue to the subject, arguing that there was no way to know such a thing as Sputnik existed: all the reports were second or third-hand and mediated through fallible machines. It was just as likely a hoax. Russell, raised as he was on science and a veteran of the BIS, had reached his limit with skepticism. His letter to Thayer is lost, but it’s clear from Thayer’s response that Russell held nothing back. Indeed, the two drifted so far apart that when Thayer died in August 1959, of a heart attack, Russell was surprised to be moved by the loss.
And yet—there is always a yet in Fortean history. Because even as Russell was drifting away from the Fortean Society, he was composing his own Fortean book, and continuing to contemplate Fortean anomalies. The June 1957 issue of Campbell’s “Astounding” ran Russell’s article on the medium Eusapia Palladino, given the Galilean title “And Still It Moves.” At the same time, Campbell wanted Russell to do an article on levitation, and the possible scientific explanations for it. Russell was in a Fortean mood, working on “Great World Mysteries,” a book of Fortean mysteries that was published in 1957. Kirkus Reviews summarized it thusly:
“Here is a follower in the footsteps of the famous Charles Fort, collector of oddities, peculiar facts and unsolved mysteries, with a symposium of real-life facts covering a wide range of bafflers. Some are familiar, such as the Mary [Celeste] case; some have current interest as his Gadget in the Sky, embracing, of course, the flying saucers of today; some deal with strange personalities, such as the Kaspar Hauser case. But many of them have a flavor of psychic phenomena,—the mysterious footprints throughout Devon—and again in scattered areas; the moving coffins in Barbados, enclosed in a completely sealed vault, evidence of levitation, incontrovertibly witnessed over the years. Then there are natural history mysteries, the sea serpents, for instance. All in all there is wonderful material here, but Eric Russell, in underplaying the melodrama has—in some cases—deadened the interest.”
The levitation article never appeared in “Astounding.” Rather, various bits and pieces of the book (including the section on levitation) appeared in “Fantastic” magazine: creeping coffins (April), levitation (May), ships that vanished (June), and satan’s footprint (August).
Having gotten that out of his system, it was almost as though Russell had nothing more to say, though of course his health may have also caused him to set writing aside. He continued his correspondence, though sporadically, and was involved with some reprints and collections. He was encouraged to continue the Fortean Society, but refused, and refused, as well, efforts to re-engage him with the Fortean community. He was offered the chance to write a biography of Fort, but passed, and so the job went to the science fiction author Damon Knight. When Ron and Paul Willis were starting the International Fortean Organization, he was asked to enlist, but demurred, and downplayed the very idea of another Fortean organization.
There’s a sense—and I could be wrong, but the impression is there—that Russell, so extremely focused on his own self as the measure of the world, could not understand the desire of younger generations to keep moving on. He was done with fiction. And he was done with Fort. So should the rest of the world be.
