Unimpressed by Fort—though dealing with him nonetheless—and irritated by the Forteans.
Sam Moskowitz was born 30 June 1920 in Newark, New Jersey, to poor Russian immigrants Harry Moskowitz and the former Rose Gerber. I do not have reliable information on the family—the names were actually quite common, and it is hard to sort out who was the Harry, Rose, and Sam Moskowitz in question.
Iy the early 1930s, according to the family, Harry was running a candy store. (Isaac Asimov, also the child of Russian immigrants, had parents who ran a candy store in New York as well.) It was there, at the store, that he encountered Astounding Stories, and became hooked by science fiction. He attended Central Commercial and Technical High School. He was a private in World War II, enlisted from 18 December 1942 to 20 October 1943, in the 610th Tank Destroyer Division. According to his military records, he had attended one year of college—but his obituary related that otherwise his family was too poor to send him to college.
Moskowitz was publishing science fiction criticism by the time he was 17; “Are We Advocates of Scientific Fiction?,” appeared in the September-October 1937 issue of “Amateur Correspondent.” He wrote some fiction in the early 1940s, out of desperation for cash. After the war, he was uninterested in continuing to write fiction. He went to work in the food industry, first driving a produce truck, and later working as a salesman.He also continued with science fiction, running clubs and shaping himself into an important critic and, perhaps, the first true scholar of science fiction as a genre.
Sam Moskowitz was born 30 June 1920 in Newark, New Jersey, to poor Russian immigrants Harry Moskowitz and the former Rose Gerber. I do not have reliable information on the family—the names were actually quite common, and it is hard to sort out who was the Harry, Rose, and Sam Moskowitz in question.
Iy the early 1930s, according to the family, Harry was running a candy store. (Isaac Asimov, also the child of Russian immigrants, had parents who ran a candy store in New York as well.) It was there, at the store, that he encountered Astounding Stories, and became hooked by science fiction. He attended Central Commercial and Technical High School. He was a private in World War II, enlisted from 18 December 1942 to 20 October 1943, in the 610th Tank Destroyer Division. According to his military records, he had attended one year of college—but his obituary related that otherwise his family was too poor to send him to college.
Moskowitz was publishing science fiction criticism by the time he was 17; “Are We Advocates of Scientific Fiction?,” appeared in the September-October 1937 issue of “Amateur Correspondent.” He wrote some fiction in the early 1940s, out of desperation for cash. After the war, he was uninterested in continuing to write fiction. He went to work in the food industry, first driving a produce truck, and later working as a salesman.He also continued with science fiction, running clubs and shaping himself into an important critic and, perhaps, the first true scholar of science fiction as a genre.
He was deeply involved in debates—famously with the group of New York science fiction fans known as The Futurians—and had wide-ranging knowledge of fantastic fiction. In 1952, Hugo Gernsback hired Moskowitz away from his produce truck to edit “Science Fiction Plus.” His first book “Immortal Storm,” was published two years later, It was a collection of his magazine articles on the genre and—as the New York Time put it—“was followed by an outpouring of anthologies, authors' biographies and other works, including ''Fiction in Old San Francisco'' (1980), which rediscovered an early strain of science fiction all but forgotten since the 1906 earthquake.”
Even as he continued to write for a variety of pro and amateur magazines, Moskowitz continued to put out books, mostly in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly anthologies. He was sure of his opinions and wrote in a bumptious style. Though he had an amazing collection of books and publications, his books are not without error, and he cannot always be trusted as a historian; he could be careless with facts. He taught the first class on science fiction, at City College in 1953. He also continued to work outside the science fiction field, too, making ends meet. Under the name Sam Martin, he edited a trade publication Quick Frozen Foods from 1955 to 1972, and was involved in technical writing for the food industry at other times.
I am do not know much about Moskowitz’s personal life. He did marry Christine Haycock in 19582. Haycock had been a nurse in World War II, and was a pioneering woman medical doctor in the army. They did not have any children, I do not believe. A life-long smoker, Moskowitz contracted throat cancer in the early 1990s and had his larynx removed, according to Wikipedia. He continued to speak at science fiction conventions using an electronic voice-box.
Sam Moskowitz died of a heart attack 15 April 1997. He was 76.
***********
Exactly when Moskowitz encountered Fort and the Forteans isn’t really important. It was early in his science fiction career, and would have happened repeatedly as he collected widely in the genre. He discovered Astounding only a year after the founding of the Fortean Society—the year that Fort died—and in 1934 that magazine serialized “Lo!” over eight issues. He would have seen references to Fort and the Society that bore his name in magazines and fanzines over the years, and heard them mentioned at science fiction gatherings. And as he investigated the history of science fiction—as well as fantastic fiction more generally—he would have uncovered even more references and parallels.
Likely, Moskowitz had opinions on Fort and the Forteans from very early on—he had a lot of opinions! But I have not uncovered any writings on the matter prior to 1963. The June issue published an article by him on Eric Frank Russell, in the course of which, necessarily, he dealt with Forteanism. At the time, Moskowitz was, if not positive, at least leaning that way: Fort, he said, was the man who had launched 1,000 science fiction stories. “He was not satisfied only with documenting such notices [of strange phenomena]; he also offered his own interpretations, displaying so vast an imaginative resource as to become a bottomless reservoir of science fiction plots.”
Moskowitz noted that Russell had originally barely noticed Fort (when he read the serialization of Lo!), only to become a convert when coming across the book some time later, in a used bookshop. Russell’s acquaintance with Fort’s works became the basis for his breakthrough novel, “Sinister Barrier,” which—Moskowitz noted—ploughed the same ground as Edmond Hamilton’s earlier “The Earth Owners,” but made Fort’s ideas more popular in science fiction than Hamilton ever had. (The money he made from the sale also allowed Russell to travel to the States, where he met Hamilton, and finished collecting Fort’s books.)
Moskowitz did allow that there might be problems with Fortean ideas in science fiction—“for good or bad, the astonishing bulk of science fiction plastered around Fortean phenomena and verging logically off into strange talents, stems from” Russell—but he did not describe the bad, and seemed only to see Fort as having a positive effect on Russell. Early on, Russell had been a rationalist, but Fort—along with the science fiction Olaf Stapledon—curbed that tendency, and allowed Russell to give his stories an emotional core. This heart was hidden, often, behind a pared down style and gruff-guy exterior, but it’s what made his stories work.
I do not know if it is the case or not, but Moskowitz’s discussion of Fort and Forteanism in his review of Russell’s career reads as though it was the first time he seriously gave the matter any thought. And it may be why he felt the need to come back around to the topic, in an article published in the same magazine exactly two years later. At the time, he was doing a series of articles for “Amazing Fact and Science Fiction”—Gernsback’s old magazine, the first one devoted to science fiction, and once the home of Ray Palmer and the Shaver mystery—on what he thought of as serious subjects, religion, birth control, and the like. His entry on Forteanism revised down his opinion of the movement. It was titled “Lo! The Poor Forteans”.
I have not seen that article, but a revised version appeared in a book that collected his serious essays, 1976’s “Strange Horizons.” (Among other things, the delay in republication allowed Moskowitz to read and incorporate into his article Damon Knight’s biography of Fort.) Now he saw in Forteans a science fictional dead-end, akin to the Shaver Mystery, and one that had hardly any effect on science fiction at all—far from the “bottomless reservoir” he had described a few years earlier. The essay is also studded with mistakes and careless extrapolations.
Moskowitz begins with the serialization of “Lo!” and the degree to which Astounding gave the book a larger audience than it otherwise would have had. But, he said, science fiction fans were mostly indifferent, first noting in the letters pages that the serial was interesting, then complaining about boredom, before being quiet about it altogether: “There was literally no controversy in the reader’s department,” he said, which was patently false. There was more than a little back and forth, and discussion of the serial continued for several months after the serial ended. He appended, as well, “There were only a few stories in the year following that by any stretch of the imagination could have bene attributed to ideas from Charles Fort,” and these were from “Book of the Damned.” Which is a true statement, but only in a limited sense—yes, the following year saw few stories directly influenced by Fort—but is also tendentious: does Fort’s influence not count if the ideas come from his first book instead of his third?
By way of an extended transition, Moskowitz went on to point out a negative review of Lo! that had run in Amazing Stories, and a remark made by Hamilton to the effect that Fort was a rebel simply for the sake of being rebellious. He then went on to digest Knight’s biography of Fort. Moskowitz was unimpressed by Fort’s fiction, and portrayed him as a pet of Dreiser, suggesting—with exclamation points—that there was something untoward about Fort being published in magazines that had connections to Dreiser. He then further went on to show that Fort was probably influenced by early examples of science fiction, from France and America—there was a trend for placing horrors in the upper atmosphere in the early part of the 20th century. Moskowitz was probably right in seeing the connection, but, again, seemed to suggest that there was something untoward about Fort working with themes that had been written about by others first.
After this ended discourse, Moskowitz comes back to Fort’s own influence. He follows—though without reference—H. Allen Smith’s claim that Ben Hecht was only interested in Fort because he cribbed a story idea from him. (There’s no evidence that any Hecht story from the time he read Fort was influenced by him.) He discusses the mutual influence between Fort and science fiction author George Allan England. And followed these remarks with extrapolations based on nothing: that after Booth Tarkington convinced Harry Leon Wilson to read Fort, Wilson filled his next book, “The Wrong Twin,” with “Fort’s wildest theories.” Except Wilson finished The Wrong Twin before reading Fort, and none of Fort’s wildest theories were in the book—or any of his theories. Moskowitz claimed that Barton [sic] Rascoe was forced by Dreiser to read Fort if Rascoe wanted Dreiser’s cooperation on a book project—there is no evidence for this assertion.
He mentions the founding of the Fortean Society, and the positive review of Lo! by Maynard Shipley in the New York Times, but, once more, suggests some nefarious goings-on: “What the readers _didn’t_ know what that Shipley, in his own fashion, had been a Fortean for ten years!” That was the problem with the omnibus edition of Fort’s works, too—it was handled at Holt by William Sloane, who had once written science fiction, and so “was scarcely an unsympathetic party.” Which hardly seems the point. Moskowitz had to know, by now, that friends and supporters often published one another; that was how the business worked.
But he was not in the mood to give the benefit of the doubt. He cast aspersions on Fort, too, though subtly, suggesting he had done something wrong by deeding his notes to Thayer and the Fortean Society, rather than Dreiser, who after all had helped him so much. (As though Fort could have predicted Thayer and Dreiser would refuse to work together; as though Fort even valued his notes, after having destroyed manuscripts and notes and contemplated doing so more often.) He also was a bit backhanded to Russell, saying that after Sinister Barrier—and not mentioning Dreadful Sanctuary—“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."
Moskowitz was of the opinion, anyway, that Fort had a limited effect on science fiction. Russell did continue to write nonfiction articles on Fortean topics; and there were a few “subtle” adaptations of Fortean ideas in the immediate wake of Campbell’s recommending Fort as a sourcebook for plots. But quality declined after a few years, he said, and most of Fort’s ideas were kept in circulation because Campbell promoted “crackpot” ideas. “Charles Fort and the Forteans,” he said, “promoted by editors and authors but never eagerly embraced by the science fiction readers, are destined for the limbo of Richard S. Shaver and the flying saucers.” It was a blind alley, down which these misguided Forteans led the genre: “It is a pretty obvious fact that no man can be right _all_ the time. Neither can a man be _wrong_ all the time. Fort came closer to being wrong all the time than any living human being of record.”
As unfair as that reading of Fort was—and it was badly unfair—Moskowitz had one great point in his favor. Fort had seemingly plumped for space being much smaller than thought, planets only hundreds of miles away. And yet—here were humans, launching craft into space, tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands miles beyond the planet’s surface. Thayer crabbed in the pages of Doubt, during the last few years of his life—Fort was long dead by this point—that there was no solid evidence these crafts had actually left the atmosphere or gone where technicians said they had gone. But that was obviously sour grapes. (Even Russell had bitched at Thayer about it, though Moskowitz probably did not know it.) Getting passed by technology and science—this was why Moskowitz titled (and concluded) his article “Lo! The poor Forteans.”
And yet—and yet. Moskowitz couldn’t quite give up on Fort and the Forteans. Baleful as their effects might have been on the field he loved, they were still part of the history, and he was intent on documenting that history. And so in 1976, he put together a small pamphlet, twenty pages long, with a total run of about 300. It was an an excerpt from the chapter that had run in “Strange Horizons,” totaling 5,000 words, on Fort’s short fictions, along with a brief introduction, and Fort’s one example of published fantastic fiction, “A Radicle Corpuscle,” which had been published in 1906. As well, their were illustrations that had accompanied the stories.
Moskowitz’s assessment in the pamphlet is not all that different from in his essay, as would be expected, though perhaps a little more nuanced and not quite as negative. In the end, though, he still saw Fort as mostly a failure, with a style well above his contemporaries, but a fatal inability to plot. His opinion, though, is not really what’s important.
What matters is that he still felt the need to send out the material, even if only photocopied, and even if only to a small coterie of followers—so small, indeed, it is tempting to conclude, though there is no evidence to prove, that he was also embarrassed by his need to keep writing about Fort. But there it was: Moskowitz did his diligence, he read Fort’s oeuvre’s, even as he didn’t much care for it, and he reported on what he found, even as he didn’t think Fort had been of an influence.
Even as he continued to write for a variety of pro and amateur magazines, Moskowitz continued to put out books, mostly in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly anthologies. He was sure of his opinions and wrote in a bumptious style. Though he had an amazing collection of books and publications, his books are not without error, and he cannot always be trusted as a historian; he could be careless with facts. He taught the first class on science fiction, at City College in 1953. He also continued to work outside the science fiction field, too, making ends meet. Under the name Sam Martin, he edited a trade publication Quick Frozen Foods from 1955 to 1972, and was involved in technical writing for the food industry at other times.
I am do not know much about Moskowitz’s personal life. He did marry Christine Haycock in 19582. Haycock had been a nurse in World War II, and was a pioneering woman medical doctor in the army. They did not have any children, I do not believe. A life-long smoker, Moskowitz contracted throat cancer in the early 1990s and had his larynx removed, according to Wikipedia. He continued to speak at science fiction conventions using an electronic voice-box.
Sam Moskowitz died of a heart attack 15 April 1997. He was 76.
***********
Exactly when Moskowitz encountered Fort and the Forteans isn’t really important. It was early in his science fiction career, and would have happened repeatedly as he collected widely in the genre. He discovered Astounding only a year after the founding of the Fortean Society—the year that Fort died—and in 1934 that magazine serialized “Lo!” over eight issues. He would have seen references to Fort and the Society that bore his name in magazines and fanzines over the years, and heard them mentioned at science fiction gatherings. And as he investigated the history of science fiction—as well as fantastic fiction more generally—he would have uncovered even more references and parallels.
Likely, Moskowitz had opinions on Fort and the Forteans from very early on—he had a lot of opinions! But I have not uncovered any writings on the matter prior to 1963. The June issue published an article by him on Eric Frank Russell, in the course of which, necessarily, he dealt with Forteanism. At the time, Moskowitz was, if not positive, at least leaning that way: Fort, he said, was the man who had launched 1,000 science fiction stories. “He was not satisfied only with documenting such notices [of strange phenomena]; he also offered his own interpretations, displaying so vast an imaginative resource as to become a bottomless reservoir of science fiction plots.”
Moskowitz noted that Russell had originally barely noticed Fort (when he read the serialization of Lo!), only to become a convert when coming across the book some time later, in a used bookshop. Russell’s acquaintance with Fort’s works became the basis for his breakthrough novel, “Sinister Barrier,” which—Moskowitz noted—ploughed the same ground as Edmond Hamilton’s earlier “The Earth Owners,” but made Fort’s ideas more popular in science fiction than Hamilton ever had. (The money he made from the sale also allowed Russell to travel to the States, where he met Hamilton, and finished collecting Fort’s books.)
Moskowitz did allow that there might be problems with Fortean ideas in science fiction—“for good or bad, the astonishing bulk of science fiction plastered around Fortean phenomena and verging logically off into strange talents, stems from” Russell—but he did not describe the bad, and seemed only to see Fort as having a positive effect on Russell. Early on, Russell had been a rationalist, but Fort—along with the science fiction Olaf Stapledon—curbed that tendency, and allowed Russell to give his stories an emotional core. This heart was hidden, often, behind a pared down style and gruff-guy exterior, but it’s what made his stories work.
I do not know if it is the case or not, but Moskowitz’s discussion of Fort and Forteanism in his review of Russell’s career reads as though it was the first time he seriously gave the matter any thought. And it may be why he felt the need to come back around to the topic, in an article published in the same magazine exactly two years later. At the time, he was doing a series of articles for “Amazing Fact and Science Fiction”—Gernsback’s old magazine, the first one devoted to science fiction, and once the home of Ray Palmer and the Shaver mystery—on what he thought of as serious subjects, religion, birth control, and the like. His entry on Forteanism revised down his opinion of the movement. It was titled “Lo! The Poor Forteans”.
I have not seen that article, but a revised version appeared in a book that collected his serious essays, 1976’s “Strange Horizons.” (Among other things, the delay in republication allowed Moskowitz to read and incorporate into his article Damon Knight’s biography of Fort.) Now he saw in Forteans a science fictional dead-end, akin to the Shaver Mystery, and one that had hardly any effect on science fiction at all—far from the “bottomless reservoir” he had described a few years earlier. The essay is also studded with mistakes and careless extrapolations.
Moskowitz begins with the serialization of “Lo!” and the degree to which Astounding gave the book a larger audience than it otherwise would have had. But, he said, science fiction fans were mostly indifferent, first noting in the letters pages that the serial was interesting, then complaining about boredom, before being quiet about it altogether: “There was literally no controversy in the reader’s department,” he said, which was patently false. There was more than a little back and forth, and discussion of the serial continued for several months after the serial ended. He appended, as well, “There were only a few stories in the year following that by any stretch of the imagination could have bene attributed to ideas from Charles Fort,” and these were from “Book of the Damned.” Which is a true statement, but only in a limited sense—yes, the following year saw few stories directly influenced by Fort—but is also tendentious: does Fort’s influence not count if the ideas come from his first book instead of his third?
By way of an extended transition, Moskowitz went on to point out a negative review of Lo! that had run in Amazing Stories, and a remark made by Hamilton to the effect that Fort was a rebel simply for the sake of being rebellious. He then went on to digest Knight’s biography of Fort. Moskowitz was unimpressed by Fort’s fiction, and portrayed him as a pet of Dreiser, suggesting—with exclamation points—that there was something untoward about Fort being published in magazines that had connections to Dreiser. He then further went on to show that Fort was probably influenced by early examples of science fiction, from France and America—there was a trend for placing horrors in the upper atmosphere in the early part of the 20th century. Moskowitz was probably right in seeing the connection, but, again, seemed to suggest that there was something untoward about Fort working with themes that had been written about by others first.
After this ended discourse, Moskowitz comes back to Fort’s own influence. He follows—though without reference—H. Allen Smith’s claim that Ben Hecht was only interested in Fort because he cribbed a story idea from him. (There’s no evidence that any Hecht story from the time he read Fort was influenced by him.) He discusses the mutual influence between Fort and science fiction author George Allan England. And followed these remarks with extrapolations based on nothing: that after Booth Tarkington convinced Harry Leon Wilson to read Fort, Wilson filled his next book, “The Wrong Twin,” with “Fort’s wildest theories.” Except Wilson finished The Wrong Twin before reading Fort, and none of Fort’s wildest theories were in the book—or any of his theories. Moskowitz claimed that Barton [sic] Rascoe was forced by Dreiser to read Fort if Rascoe wanted Dreiser’s cooperation on a book project—there is no evidence for this assertion.
He mentions the founding of the Fortean Society, and the positive review of Lo! by Maynard Shipley in the New York Times, but, once more, suggests some nefarious goings-on: “What the readers _didn’t_ know what that Shipley, in his own fashion, had been a Fortean for ten years!” That was the problem with the omnibus edition of Fort’s works, too—it was handled at Holt by William Sloane, who had once written science fiction, and so “was scarcely an unsympathetic party.” Which hardly seems the point. Moskowitz had to know, by now, that friends and supporters often published one another; that was how the business worked.
But he was not in the mood to give the benefit of the doubt. He cast aspersions on Fort, too, though subtly, suggesting he had done something wrong by deeding his notes to Thayer and the Fortean Society, rather than Dreiser, who after all had helped him so much. (As though Fort could have predicted Thayer and Dreiser would refuse to work together; as though Fort even valued his notes, after having destroyed manuscripts and notes and contemplated doing so more often.) He also was a bit backhanded to Russell, saying that after Sinister Barrier—and not mentioning Dreadful Sanctuary—“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."
Moskowitz was of the opinion, anyway, that Fort had a limited effect on science fiction. Russell did continue to write nonfiction articles on Fortean topics; and there were a few “subtle” adaptations of Fortean ideas in the immediate wake of Campbell’s recommending Fort as a sourcebook for plots. But quality declined after a few years, he said, and most of Fort’s ideas were kept in circulation because Campbell promoted “crackpot” ideas. “Charles Fort and the Forteans,” he said, “promoted by editors and authors but never eagerly embraced by the science fiction readers, are destined for the limbo of Richard S. Shaver and the flying saucers.” It was a blind alley, down which these misguided Forteans led the genre: “It is a pretty obvious fact that no man can be right _all_ the time. Neither can a man be _wrong_ all the time. Fort came closer to being wrong all the time than any living human being of record.”
As unfair as that reading of Fort was—and it was badly unfair—Moskowitz had one great point in his favor. Fort had seemingly plumped for space being much smaller than thought, planets only hundreds of miles away. And yet—here were humans, launching craft into space, tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands miles beyond the planet’s surface. Thayer crabbed in the pages of Doubt, during the last few years of his life—Fort was long dead by this point—that there was no solid evidence these crafts had actually left the atmosphere or gone where technicians said they had gone. But that was obviously sour grapes. (Even Russell had bitched at Thayer about it, though Moskowitz probably did not know it.) Getting passed by technology and science—this was why Moskowitz titled (and concluded) his article “Lo! The poor Forteans.”
And yet—and yet. Moskowitz couldn’t quite give up on Fort and the Forteans. Baleful as their effects might have been on the field he loved, they were still part of the history, and he was intent on documenting that history. And so in 1976, he put together a small pamphlet, twenty pages long, with a total run of about 300. It was an an excerpt from the chapter that had run in “Strange Horizons,” totaling 5,000 words, on Fort’s short fictions, along with a brief introduction, and Fort’s one example of published fantastic fiction, “A Radicle Corpuscle,” which had been published in 1906. As well, their were illustrations that had accompanied the stories.
Moskowitz’s assessment in the pamphlet is not all that different from in his essay, as would be expected, though perhaps a little more nuanced and not quite as negative. In the end, though, he still saw Fort as mostly a failure, with a style well above his contemporaries, but a fatal inability to plot. His opinion, though, is not really what’s important.
What matters is that he still felt the need to send out the material, even if only photocopied, and even if only to a small coterie of followers—so small, indeed, it is tempting to conclude, though there is no evidence to prove, that he was also embarrassed by his need to keep writing about Fort. But there it was: Moskowitz did his diligence, he read Fort’s oeuvre’s, even as he didn’t much care for it, and he reported on what he found, even as he didn’t think Fort had been of an influence.
