Samuel Kimball Merwin, Jr., was born 28 April 1910 in Plainfield, New Jersey. His parents, Samuel Merwin, Sr., a writer, and Edna (Flesheim), a musician and music teacher, had been married since 1901. Both were from Illinois. Samuel was their second son; in 1904, Edna had given birth to Samuel Bannister, but he had died in 1907. At some point between 1910 and 1915, the family adopted another son, John, and relocated to Queens, New York.
The elder Merwin began to make his mark on the literary scene just before World War I. In his early phase, he was progressive, in favor of women’s writes and chafing at America’s conservatism. After his own success, and the winning of the right to vote by women, he became more conservative himself, according to eh New York Times. He worried over the more liberal ways of youth in the wake of the Great War and complained women’s emancipation had led to the flapper and “millions and millions of young feminine creature underdressed, over-supplied with money, automobiles and freedom, indulging in jazz, liquor and wildness.” His novels, the Times said, were critical of contemporary society, though marked also by “wide understanding and traces of idealistic hopes for modern society.”
The elder Merwin began to make his mark on the literary scene just before World War I. In his early phase, he was progressive, in favor of women’s writes and chafing at America’s conservatism. After his own success, and the winning of the right to vote by women, he became more conservative himself, according to eh New York Times. He worried over the more liberal ways of youth in the wake of the Great War and complained women’s emancipation had led to the flapper and “millions and millions of young feminine creature underdressed, over-supplied with money, automobiles and freedom, indulging in jazz, liquor and wildness.” His novels, the Times said, were critical of contemporary society, though marked also by “wide understanding and traces of idealistic hopes for modern society.”
By 1920, the family was settled in Concord, Massachusetts; though Merwin, Senior, also kept an apartment in New York City. While writing, he ran a a playhouse, too, and Edna taught music. Merwin, Junior, attended Phillips-Andover and then Princeton, graduating in 1931. He studied art after graduation and went into journalism. The middle of the 1930s proved to be a crux time for the younger Merwin. On 3 January 1934, he married Lee Ann Vance; her family, like Merwin’s, was from the Midwest. She had graduated from Goucher College in 1930. Later that year, his brother John, died. He was only 24. And then two years later: Lee gave birth to the couple’s only child, Mather; and Sam’s father unexpectedly died of a stroke, at the age of 62.
In the late thirties, the Sam Merwin reconstructed himself as a popular writer: of mysteries, adventure, westerns, romance, and science fiction. He also worked as an editor. In 1937, he worked as an editor at Dell. In 1939, he published his first science fiction story “The Scourge Below.” In 1940, he published his first novel, a mystery, “Murder in Miniatures.” Over the next fifteen years or so, he wrote some 70 science fiction stories, a handful of mystery novels, probably a hundred mystery shorts, and an unknown number of romance, westerns, and adventures, using his own name as well as the pseudonyms Carter Sprague, Matt Lee, Vincent Flam, Jacques Jean Ferrat, Amanda Welldon, and—for romances—Elizabeth Deare Bennett.”
It seems that some of his father’s interest in sexual politics was passed on to his son. Three of his mystery novels featured the detective Amy Brewster, who was consciously defined against here conventions: she smokes cigars, weighs three hundred pounds, and is not submissive, as English professor William Marking notes. And a 1953 story, “The White Widows” (later reprinted as “The Sex War”) focused on a dystopian world run by women. That he was writing romance stories, targeted at women, would also suggest this interest.
For all that he put out a prodigious amount of stories for pulp magazines, Merwin is best remembered as an editor of science fiction publications. In 1941, he went to work for Standard Magazines, and in 1945 took over the science fiction magazines “Startling Stories” and “Thrilling Wonder Stories.” By popular consensus, both were in bad shape, publishing poorly written hackneyed stories. He raised the quality of both, making them admirable competitors of John W. Campbell’s Astounding, which by later critical consensus was the best of the lot, although some fans were not so pleased with Campbell, and Carlos Lavender, for example, preferred Merwin’s magazines.
In 1950, he edited “Fantastic Story Quarterly” and “Wonder Story Annual,” which were companions to the magazines he was mostly associated with. In 1951, he quit editing to become a freelance writer, although the doesn’t seem to have lasted very long, as he was back at editing shortly thereafter: King Size Publications (1952); the first issue of “Fantastic Universe” (1953); editor at Renown (1955-56); the first two issues of “Satellite Science Fiction” (1956); “Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine” (1956); and at some point he was associated with “Galaxy” as an assistant editor. He also wrote some comics.
In 1956, or thereabouts, Merwin left publishing for Hollywood, and I mostly lose track of him. He may have been involved in magazine publishing again, as in the mid-1960s he was charged, alongside several others, in a couple of cases, accused of using the mail to send obscene material, for having material in adult magazine put out by Martin Luros. It could be that Merwin’s only contribution was reprints, though. In August 1969, hie wife Lee died. Three months later, on 11 October, he married again, Marjorie Kendall, in Los Angeles.
Samuel K. Merwin, Jr., died 13 January 1996. He was 85.
**************
The origins of Merwin’s interest in Fort are obscure; as is the length of his fascination with the puckish Bronx philosopher. But, for the short period it was on display, his Forteanism does seem sincere. I do not know that he was ever a member of the Fortean Society—his name never appeared in its pages—but he did seem to pay attention to it. And, what is more, he read Fort, on a somewhat regular basis, it seems, and Fort’s thoughts shaped some of his writing.
Likely, Merwin came across Fort once he was in the science fictional world—he claimed never to have read a science fiction magazine before taking over editorship of two, even though he had published in them, which may or may not be true, but once he did become editor, in the mid-1940s, he had to have seen mentions of Fort. Probably this led him to reading at least two of his books, The Book of the Damned and Lo! Of course, he moved through art worlds in the 1930s, and he may have bumped into Fort then, or through some more serendipitous path.
At any rate, the first time he mentioned Fort, as far as I have been able to determine, is in a March 1948 editorial for “Startling Stories.” The editorial worked as an introduction to Fort, a shot at science, and a summation of his own Forteanism. He mentioned that he’d recently been re-reading “Lo!”—which is interesting, since he singles out that volume, and not the omnibus edition of Fort’s works—and had come across one of Fort’s quips about the interrelations of all things: “I am not much given to prophecy, but I’ll take this chance—that if England loses India, we may expect hard winters in England.”
Fort’s musing made Merwin think of the hard winter just passed—presumably the so-called Great Blizzard of 1947 that hammered the Northeast around Christmas time. (As it happens, other Forteans had been prepared: Thayer mentioned the comment in Doubt 18, which came out around July of 1947.) True enough, a Great Blizzard in New England isn’t really the same thing as a hard winter in Old England, but it was enough to give Merwin pause, he said, and a hook for discussing Fort.
As Merwin saw it, Fort was most interesting not for his collection of facts—which could be tedious reading. This put him at odds with, say, the science fiction editor John W. Campbell who was mostly interested in the data that Fort had collected, and thought it was both grist for the science fictional mill and perhaps the seed of several new sciences. No, what Merwin saw was that Fort moderated the ambitions of scientists. He didn’t undermine the scientific project entirely—Merwin was unwilling to follow some of Fort’s theorizing, and reluctant to accept some of the facts he had gathered—but warned scientists against taking their own ideas too seriously. (Just as Fort himself did not take his own ideas too seriously.)
Scientific ideas went through phases—first they were ridiculed, then accepted, and finally, superseded, seen as passé. This was universally true, Merwin said, so it was wrong of scientists too put too much value on currently accepted scientific ideas: they too would be transcended. His reading of Fort, therefore, married Fortean skepticism to a belief in scientific progress that was probably more robust than most scientist’s—a reaction, one assumes, to the rapid changes in science over the previous century, and the assumption that the changes would continue, in the exact same fields, fundamentally reworking all forms of knowledge.
It wasn’t the data, or Fort’s theories—they were ridiculous. But that was the point: all knowledge would some day seem ridiculous, even the currently accepted theories of physicists and astronomers. Reading Fort, he thought, could save the world from scientific hubris. (In a very dated analogy, he compared scientists to “Japs,” both wanting to save face, no matter how many had to die in that quest.) Merwin concluded, “They should read Fort, if only to open their minds, and re-read him to keep them open, no matter how far astray his conclusion may turn out to be. Perhaps, when the long-awaited space flights are finally made, they may not prove to be so far off-beam as they now seem.”
Merwin punctuated his brief for Fort in the letter’s column of the magazine. One reader had complimented Murray Leinster’s story “The Man in the Iron Cap” for having the aliens invade the earth subtly, without the pyrotechnics of so many space battles. In his response, Merwin tipped his hat to Fort as a guide not just for scientists, but science fictionists, too, and suggested Fortean ideas might inform his editorial practices—by accepting stories such as Leinster’s, which seemed Fortean, whether or not Leinster himself had ever read Fort: “For exhaustive comment on the possibilities of alien (i.e. extratellurian) civilizations and conflict, better delve into Charles Fort. He really kicks the old gong around with that one. Otherwise, thanks for a kindly missive.”
A few years later, Merwin turned his attention to Fort once again. He had another editorial on him, this time in the Thrilling Wonder Stories issue dated February 1951. Recent work on Pluto had gotten him thinking about Fort: measurements of the planet(oid)’s size and gravitational effect suggested it was incredibly dense, moreso than was expected, certainly. Merwin commented, “If Charles Fort had not died on May 3, 1932, some two and a half years after Pluto was first photographed by Clyde W. Tombaugh of the Lowell Observatory, we have a hunch that the announcement of this astronomical bloomer would have caused him to laugh himself to death. For astronomers and their pretensions to accurate understanding of the universe in which we live were the favorite game of this supreme iconoclast of science.”
He went on to give a different digest of Fort’s ideas, rooted this time in The Book of the Damned (again, not the omnibus edition), in which case science’s main problem is it is trying to define and delimit objects—when in the Fortean cosmology, that was impossible, since everything was a continuum, one thing shading into the next. Soon enough, though, Merwin was back to his previous stance. He admitted that Fort might seem out of fashion after the discovery of nuclear fission—that seemed proof that scientists had reliable working knowledge of the universe’s fundamental laws—but Merwin did not think that changed the importance of Fort.
Because, in his view, Fort did not stand against science, only clipped its hubris—Fort was a necessary component of science: “But Charles Fort did have a sound idea in attempting to abolish the dogma of science—he never assailed science itself despite the war-cries of his detractors. He believed that each scientific theory passed through three stages—the first when, as something radically different from and destructive to prevailing theories, it was decried as false—the second when, as accepted fact, it was pronounced absolute truth—the third when, superseded by other theories, it was ridiculed as passé. Why, he wanted to know, should it be any more sacred during its period of acceptance than during its other two periods? To this, of course, there can be no logical answer save that of human asininity.”
Merwin then explained that scientists were driven by their own personal ambitions, which could shape their science, and even lead them to making false claims. He tried to explain his point using Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union, and contrasting it with standard genetics, but he got very confused, and showed a misunderstanding of evolutionary thought. The point was, though, never mind the details, “The trouble is, of course, that the scientists who measure such things are human beings, therefore prey to all the emotional illogic from which human beings suffer. Even cybernetics may not be the ultimate answer to absolutely scientific measurements—for the machines must be made by men who must formulate the questions put to our most unprejudiced mechanical brains.”
Pluto, he said, was proof of his thesis. There were too many places where human judgment could have effected measurements. Best to just go there with a tape measure and take the readings directly, he said. After all, the periodicity of Pluto meant that telescopic measurements would be slow, and, according to the scientists involved, take some two decades. Surely some earth craft could reach the planet in that time?
By the end of his main editorial tenure, Merwin was known for his Fortean inclinations, and could use them to tweak his readers. A letter in the March 1951 “Fantastic Story” mentioned a Fortean item the writer assumed Merwin would enjoy: an anecdote about a locust in a package of frozen spinach that hopped about once thawed. In that same issue, Merwin wrote a Fortean editorial: “What can only be termed practical astrology is currently being practiced.” He noted that radio stations had recently determined that static was caused by the positions of the planets.
That is to say, “broadcasting power, save in the case of static-proof frequency modulation, is being regulated in direct accordance with the positions of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn et cie. And if that is not astrology in action we don't know what is. Scoffers may attempt to palm it off as astronomy, tangential outgrowth of the older science. But astronomy is the direct study of heavenly bodies per se in an effort to determine through observation the nature of the universe. When it comes to Earth-control exercised by these bodies we are back in astrological boundaries.” He then went on to give a history of astrology, explaining it as both a kind of science—superseded, and now seen as wrong, in his Fortean terms—and a way people in desperate situations could make decisions.
Fort was clearly on his mind at this time, because a year later—in March 1952—Campbell’s Astounding ran a story by him, “Star Tracks” that was basically a fictionalization of Fort’s ideas. Astronomers determined that the only real astronomical objects were the earth and the sun. The planets were disks or marbles—that still had to be deciphered—and the stars tracked along a dark barrier. It was a blow to the human ego: “Man could dream, like Columbus, of new worlds. Now”—she looked up at him—“that dream is dead, a trick of the atmosphere. Charles Fort was right—astronomers are the greatest fools of all; and our universe is property—whose we cannot guess. It is a very great joke, Bob. And Earth must struggle along on the planet it has ravaged, with its overpopulation, its stupid clashing ideologies, its wars, its impractical religions. We are headed for a bad time, I fear.”
His editorial successor, Samuel Mines, put a bow on Merwin’s Fortean period. The January issue of “Fantastic Story” included an editorial—“A Word About the Works of—Charles Fort: The Disciple of Disbelief”—that seemed a direct response to Merwin’s editorship. The piece began: “It has been said that no truly complete understanding of science fiction is possible without at least a nodding acquaintance with the works of Charles Fort. In a sense, Fort was the idealization of a scientist, for he accepted nothing at its apparent face value and was eternally skeptical of all ‘facts.’”
The rest of the editorial was as wobbly as that introduction, which conflated Fort as scientist and Fort as science fiction-inspiration. Nothing like the sure-footedness of Merwin’s interpretation of Fort. Mine continued by looking at Tiffany Thayer, and how influenced he was by Fort (and bristling at Thayer’s own dogmatism). He followed quotation after quotation, without really coming to a point beyond his concluding one, that everyone involved with science fiction should read something by Fort. One gets the sense that Mines’s heart wasn’t in the pitch, but he felt it worth saying.
Mines took up Merwin’s Forteanism again a few months later, in the April issue of “Thrilling Wonder Stories.” The editorial started with a mention of Merwin’s piece on astrology that had been his valedictory “Fantastic Story.” Mines did not want to take the piece too seriously, though it had supposedly generated a fair amount of controversy. He wanted it to be understood as provocative—a bit of Fortean play. Mines wrote, “Some months ago, Sam Merwin perpetrated an editorial in FSM which pointed out in amusement that Science, striding along head in sky, had stubbed its big toe upon astrology, the lowly and despised. . . . Sam’s article aroused comment, as his usually do, and this added immeasurably to The Merwin’s [sic] Fortean enjoyment of the gag. For, like a good reporter, he was not blowing a horn for astrology, he was merely passing on a news item as it came to him. The resulting uproar, therefore, was balm to his ears, since the whole business had definite aspects of humor.”
One cannot help but get the sense that Mines was distancing himself from Merwin, using Merwin’s Forteanism as an excuse to end the discussion before it wandered away. Whether that is true or not, the fact remains, Sam Merwin was known as a Fortean, used Fortean ideas in his fictions, and thought about scientific developments in a way that had been influenced by his reading of Charles Fort.
In the late thirties, the Sam Merwin reconstructed himself as a popular writer: of mysteries, adventure, westerns, romance, and science fiction. He also worked as an editor. In 1937, he worked as an editor at Dell. In 1939, he published his first science fiction story “The Scourge Below.” In 1940, he published his first novel, a mystery, “Murder in Miniatures.” Over the next fifteen years or so, he wrote some 70 science fiction stories, a handful of mystery novels, probably a hundred mystery shorts, and an unknown number of romance, westerns, and adventures, using his own name as well as the pseudonyms Carter Sprague, Matt Lee, Vincent Flam, Jacques Jean Ferrat, Amanda Welldon, and—for romances—Elizabeth Deare Bennett.”
It seems that some of his father’s interest in sexual politics was passed on to his son. Three of his mystery novels featured the detective Amy Brewster, who was consciously defined against here conventions: she smokes cigars, weighs three hundred pounds, and is not submissive, as English professor William Marking notes. And a 1953 story, “The White Widows” (later reprinted as “The Sex War”) focused on a dystopian world run by women. That he was writing romance stories, targeted at women, would also suggest this interest.
For all that he put out a prodigious amount of stories for pulp magazines, Merwin is best remembered as an editor of science fiction publications. In 1941, he went to work for Standard Magazines, and in 1945 took over the science fiction magazines “Startling Stories” and “Thrilling Wonder Stories.” By popular consensus, both were in bad shape, publishing poorly written hackneyed stories. He raised the quality of both, making them admirable competitors of John W. Campbell’s Astounding, which by later critical consensus was the best of the lot, although some fans were not so pleased with Campbell, and Carlos Lavender, for example, preferred Merwin’s magazines.
In 1950, he edited “Fantastic Story Quarterly” and “Wonder Story Annual,” which were companions to the magazines he was mostly associated with. In 1951, he quit editing to become a freelance writer, although the doesn’t seem to have lasted very long, as he was back at editing shortly thereafter: King Size Publications (1952); the first issue of “Fantastic Universe” (1953); editor at Renown (1955-56); the first two issues of “Satellite Science Fiction” (1956); “Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine” (1956); and at some point he was associated with “Galaxy” as an assistant editor. He also wrote some comics.
In 1956, or thereabouts, Merwin left publishing for Hollywood, and I mostly lose track of him. He may have been involved in magazine publishing again, as in the mid-1960s he was charged, alongside several others, in a couple of cases, accused of using the mail to send obscene material, for having material in adult magazine put out by Martin Luros. It could be that Merwin’s only contribution was reprints, though. In August 1969, hie wife Lee died. Three months later, on 11 October, he married again, Marjorie Kendall, in Los Angeles.
Samuel K. Merwin, Jr., died 13 January 1996. He was 85.
**************
The origins of Merwin’s interest in Fort are obscure; as is the length of his fascination with the puckish Bronx philosopher. But, for the short period it was on display, his Forteanism does seem sincere. I do not know that he was ever a member of the Fortean Society—his name never appeared in its pages—but he did seem to pay attention to it. And, what is more, he read Fort, on a somewhat regular basis, it seems, and Fort’s thoughts shaped some of his writing.
Likely, Merwin came across Fort once he was in the science fictional world—he claimed never to have read a science fiction magazine before taking over editorship of two, even though he had published in them, which may or may not be true, but once he did become editor, in the mid-1940s, he had to have seen mentions of Fort. Probably this led him to reading at least two of his books, The Book of the Damned and Lo! Of course, he moved through art worlds in the 1930s, and he may have bumped into Fort then, or through some more serendipitous path.
At any rate, the first time he mentioned Fort, as far as I have been able to determine, is in a March 1948 editorial for “Startling Stories.” The editorial worked as an introduction to Fort, a shot at science, and a summation of his own Forteanism. He mentioned that he’d recently been re-reading “Lo!”—which is interesting, since he singles out that volume, and not the omnibus edition of Fort’s works—and had come across one of Fort’s quips about the interrelations of all things: “I am not much given to prophecy, but I’ll take this chance—that if England loses India, we may expect hard winters in England.”
Fort’s musing made Merwin think of the hard winter just passed—presumably the so-called Great Blizzard of 1947 that hammered the Northeast around Christmas time. (As it happens, other Forteans had been prepared: Thayer mentioned the comment in Doubt 18, which came out around July of 1947.) True enough, a Great Blizzard in New England isn’t really the same thing as a hard winter in Old England, but it was enough to give Merwin pause, he said, and a hook for discussing Fort.
As Merwin saw it, Fort was most interesting not for his collection of facts—which could be tedious reading. This put him at odds with, say, the science fiction editor John W. Campbell who was mostly interested in the data that Fort had collected, and thought it was both grist for the science fictional mill and perhaps the seed of several new sciences. No, what Merwin saw was that Fort moderated the ambitions of scientists. He didn’t undermine the scientific project entirely—Merwin was unwilling to follow some of Fort’s theorizing, and reluctant to accept some of the facts he had gathered—but warned scientists against taking their own ideas too seriously. (Just as Fort himself did not take his own ideas too seriously.)
Scientific ideas went through phases—first they were ridiculed, then accepted, and finally, superseded, seen as passé. This was universally true, Merwin said, so it was wrong of scientists too put too much value on currently accepted scientific ideas: they too would be transcended. His reading of Fort, therefore, married Fortean skepticism to a belief in scientific progress that was probably more robust than most scientist’s—a reaction, one assumes, to the rapid changes in science over the previous century, and the assumption that the changes would continue, in the exact same fields, fundamentally reworking all forms of knowledge.
It wasn’t the data, or Fort’s theories—they were ridiculous. But that was the point: all knowledge would some day seem ridiculous, even the currently accepted theories of physicists and astronomers. Reading Fort, he thought, could save the world from scientific hubris. (In a very dated analogy, he compared scientists to “Japs,” both wanting to save face, no matter how many had to die in that quest.) Merwin concluded, “They should read Fort, if only to open their minds, and re-read him to keep them open, no matter how far astray his conclusion may turn out to be. Perhaps, when the long-awaited space flights are finally made, they may not prove to be so far off-beam as they now seem.”
Merwin punctuated his brief for Fort in the letter’s column of the magazine. One reader had complimented Murray Leinster’s story “The Man in the Iron Cap” for having the aliens invade the earth subtly, without the pyrotechnics of so many space battles. In his response, Merwin tipped his hat to Fort as a guide not just for scientists, but science fictionists, too, and suggested Fortean ideas might inform his editorial practices—by accepting stories such as Leinster’s, which seemed Fortean, whether or not Leinster himself had ever read Fort: “For exhaustive comment on the possibilities of alien (i.e. extratellurian) civilizations and conflict, better delve into Charles Fort. He really kicks the old gong around with that one. Otherwise, thanks for a kindly missive.”
A few years later, Merwin turned his attention to Fort once again. He had another editorial on him, this time in the Thrilling Wonder Stories issue dated February 1951. Recent work on Pluto had gotten him thinking about Fort: measurements of the planet(oid)’s size and gravitational effect suggested it was incredibly dense, moreso than was expected, certainly. Merwin commented, “If Charles Fort had not died on May 3, 1932, some two and a half years after Pluto was first photographed by Clyde W. Tombaugh of the Lowell Observatory, we have a hunch that the announcement of this astronomical bloomer would have caused him to laugh himself to death. For astronomers and their pretensions to accurate understanding of the universe in which we live were the favorite game of this supreme iconoclast of science.”
He went on to give a different digest of Fort’s ideas, rooted this time in The Book of the Damned (again, not the omnibus edition), in which case science’s main problem is it is trying to define and delimit objects—when in the Fortean cosmology, that was impossible, since everything was a continuum, one thing shading into the next. Soon enough, though, Merwin was back to his previous stance. He admitted that Fort might seem out of fashion after the discovery of nuclear fission—that seemed proof that scientists had reliable working knowledge of the universe’s fundamental laws—but Merwin did not think that changed the importance of Fort.
Because, in his view, Fort did not stand against science, only clipped its hubris—Fort was a necessary component of science: “But Charles Fort did have a sound idea in attempting to abolish the dogma of science—he never assailed science itself despite the war-cries of his detractors. He believed that each scientific theory passed through three stages—the first when, as something radically different from and destructive to prevailing theories, it was decried as false—the second when, as accepted fact, it was pronounced absolute truth—the third when, superseded by other theories, it was ridiculed as passé. Why, he wanted to know, should it be any more sacred during its period of acceptance than during its other two periods? To this, of course, there can be no logical answer save that of human asininity.”
Merwin then explained that scientists were driven by their own personal ambitions, which could shape their science, and even lead them to making false claims. He tried to explain his point using Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union, and contrasting it with standard genetics, but he got very confused, and showed a misunderstanding of evolutionary thought. The point was, though, never mind the details, “The trouble is, of course, that the scientists who measure such things are human beings, therefore prey to all the emotional illogic from which human beings suffer. Even cybernetics may not be the ultimate answer to absolutely scientific measurements—for the machines must be made by men who must formulate the questions put to our most unprejudiced mechanical brains.”
Pluto, he said, was proof of his thesis. There were too many places where human judgment could have effected measurements. Best to just go there with a tape measure and take the readings directly, he said. After all, the periodicity of Pluto meant that telescopic measurements would be slow, and, according to the scientists involved, take some two decades. Surely some earth craft could reach the planet in that time?
By the end of his main editorial tenure, Merwin was known for his Fortean inclinations, and could use them to tweak his readers. A letter in the March 1951 “Fantastic Story” mentioned a Fortean item the writer assumed Merwin would enjoy: an anecdote about a locust in a package of frozen spinach that hopped about once thawed. In that same issue, Merwin wrote a Fortean editorial: “What can only be termed practical astrology is currently being practiced.” He noted that radio stations had recently determined that static was caused by the positions of the planets.
That is to say, “broadcasting power, save in the case of static-proof frequency modulation, is being regulated in direct accordance with the positions of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn et cie. And if that is not astrology in action we don't know what is. Scoffers may attempt to palm it off as astronomy, tangential outgrowth of the older science. But astronomy is the direct study of heavenly bodies per se in an effort to determine through observation the nature of the universe. When it comes to Earth-control exercised by these bodies we are back in astrological boundaries.” He then went on to give a history of astrology, explaining it as both a kind of science—superseded, and now seen as wrong, in his Fortean terms—and a way people in desperate situations could make decisions.
Fort was clearly on his mind at this time, because a year later—in March 1952—Campbell’s Astounding ran a story by him, “Star Tracks” that was basically a fictionalization of Fort’s ideas. Astronomers determined that the only real astronomical objects were the earth and the sun. The planets were disks or marbles—that still had to be deciphered—and the stars tracked along a dark barrier. It was a blow to the human ego: “Man could dream, like Columbus, of new worlds. Now”—she looked up at him—“that dream is dead, a trick of the atmosphere. Charles Fort was right—astronomers are the greatest fools of all; and our universe is property—whose we cannot guess. It is a very great joke, Bob. And Earth must struggle along on the planet it has ravaged, with its overpopulation, its stupid clashing ideologies, its wars, its impractical religions. We are headed for a bad time, I fear.”
His editorial successor, Samuel Mines, put a bow on Merwin’s Fortean period. The January issue of “Fantastic Story” included an editorial—“A Word About the Works of—Charles Fort: The Disciple of Disbelief”—that seemed a direct response to Merwin’s editorship. The piece began: “It has been said that no truly complete understanding of science fiction is possible without at least a nodding acquaintance with the works of Charles Fort. In a sense, Fort was the idealization of a scientist, for he accepted nothing at its apparent face value and was eternally skeptical of all ‘facts.’”
The rest of the editorial was as wobbly as that introduction, which conflated Fort as scientist and Fort as science fiction-inspiration. Nothing like the sure-footedness of Merwin’s interpretation of Fort. Mine continued by looking at Tiffany Thayer, and how influenced he was by Fort (and bristling at Thayer’s own dogmatism). He followed quotation after quotation, without really coming to a point beyond his concluding one, that everyone involved with science fiction should read something by Fort. One gets the sense that Mines’s heart wasn’t in the pitch, but he felt it worth saying.
Mines took up Merwin’s Forteanism again a few months later, in the April issue of “Thrilling Wonder Stories.” The editorial started with a mention of Merwin’s piece on astrology that had been his valedictory “Fantastic Story.” Mines did not want to take the piece too seriously, though it had supposedly generated a fair amount of controversy. He wanted it to be understood as provocative—a bit of Fortean play. Mines wrote, “Some months ago, Sam Merwin perpetrated an editorial in FSM which pointed out in amusement that Science, striding along head in sky, had stubbed its big toe upon astrology, the lowly and despised. . . . Sam’s article aroused comment, as his usually do, and this added immeasurably to The Merwin’s [sic] Fortean enjoyment of the gag. For, like a good reporter, he was not blowing a horn for astrology, he was merely passing on a news item as it came to him. The resulting uproar, therefore, was balm to his ears, since the whole business had definite aspects of humor.”
One cannot help but get the sense that Mines was distancing himself from Merwin, using Merwin’s Forteanism as an excuse to end the discussion before it wandered away. Whether that is true or not, the fact remains, Sam Merwin was known as a Fortean, used Fortean ideas in his fictions, and thought about scientific developments in a way that had been influenced by his reading of Charles Fort.
