New Lands Author:Charles Fort "There are many books that tell of sightings of ghosts, aliens, and strange animals. But Charles Fort's NEW LANDS is perhaps the only book in which whole continents, geographies, and, indeed, planetary systems themselves are seen in the same uncertain twilight of perception. "Fort is the great philosopher of such eternal cosmic instability. I... more »n his view, both consciousness and what we like to call objective materiality run along octaves of appearances in a world of intermediate states. In his work, the absolute real and the absolute unreal of mechanistic science become Platonic approximations, impossible as the limit in the Calculus, or the contact between the lovers in Keats' ODE ON A GRECIAN URN. In this he is the first postmodern thinker of the 20th century. "Just one of Charles Fort?s achievements is that he casts a new light on our great institution of Skeptical Reason. Objective factual certainty becomes wonder management, a kind of psychic scaling by means of which disturbing anomalies, paradoxes, and contradictions are controlled rather than verified, distanced rather than objectified--if only in order to keep us sane." --Colin Bennett, author of POLITICS OF THE IMAGINATION and LOOKING FOR ORTHON« less