“The apostle of wonder Charles Fort damned scientific expertise and modern institutions that ignored the anomalous, the marvelous, and the unforeseen. But what happened when his iconoclastic acolytes institutionalized Forteanism? In this deeply researched, original history, Buhs impressively excavates the little-known, yet seminal, influence Forteanism had on aesthetic modernism, science fiction, UFOlogy, and contemporary conspiracy culture. Buhs reveals that Forteanism, usually regarded as a peripheral phenomenon, is actually central to any understanding of modernity’s perils and potentials.”
— Michael Saler, author of As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality
“Marvelous, skeptical, conspiracist, ironic: Charles Fort’s modernism has pollinated many strange flowers in recent culture. This fascinating book introduces readers to the many (contradictory, unexpected) bearers of the label ‘Fortean’ in the hundred years since Fort’s The Book of the Damned was published, showing how art, literature, science, and politics all curved under its weird yet apparently inevitable gravitational pull. Buhs’s writing is sparkling, sprinkled with vignettes that pay homage to the bluster and whirl of Fort’s unmistakable style.”
— Charlotte Sleigh, author of The Paper Zoo: 500 Years of Animals in Art
“Buhs makes a strong case in Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers that the eccentric writer cast a long shadow, leaving a mark not only on the world of Bigfoot hunters and UFO buffs but also in literature, where his fans stretched from the modernist avant garde to the science fiction pulps. . . . Buhs’ engaging study displays the libertarian-leaning strains of Fort’s following, from the San Francisco Renaissance to the Discordians, and it shows the milieu’s less liberty-friendly sides as well.”
— Reason
“Enthralling . . . Buhs’s erudite narrative is jam-packed with minor and major 20th-century figures who he shows were influenced by Fort. The result is a lively alternative history of modernity.”
— Publishers Weekly
“As Buhs demonstrates in the meticulously researched Think to New Worlds, Fort was always popular with those attuned to the arts.”
— AIPT
“[Fort’s] penchant for compiling earnest reports of bizarre happenings by scanning through newspapers, magazines and scientific journals set off an army of emulators—the Forteans, as cultural historian and author Buhs skillfully recounts in a compelling narrative about the birth of modern ‘anomaly hunting.’”
— Nature
“Ultimately, the problem (and the allure) of Fort is that the revelation that runs through his work is explicitly anti-discipline, anti-methodology. The facts of the damned, by definition, simply cannot be incorporated into any kind of stable system. Again and again, reading Think to New Worlds, one is reminded that as soon as doubt ossifies into a stance, it ceases to be radical and becomes dogmatic.”
— Chronicle of Higher Education