As far as I can tell—and that’s not very far, to be honest—Anthony Boucher was not a member of the San Francisco Fortean Society or, strictly speaking, a Fortean. But, he was interested in Fort and, as an Oakland resident a major player in the crime and science fiction scenes, helped to connect many of the disparate threads of Bay Area Forteanism. He promoted some people interested in Fort—such as Miriam Allen de Ford (Shipley)--, gave Fortean ideas space in the magazines he edited, particularly The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which became the standard-bearer for science fiction (and weird) writing in the 1950s, the successor to Weird Tales and John W. Campbell’s Astounding (although they competed for a time). Understanding Anthony Boucher’s role in Forteanism expands the view of California Forteanism, sketching in some of its connections between North and South and moving my discussion, which has been primarily biographical, to a larger—although still local—context.
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