Robert Anton Wilson RIP

[Otto]

 Obituary
Robert Anton Wilson
He turned Playboy readers' conspiracy theories into drug-assisted cult fiction

As 1960s counterculture morphed into the me-decade of the 1970s, part
of any hip library was the Illuminatus trilogy, whose co-author,
Robert Anton Wilson, has died aged 74. Post-polio syndrome had
weakened his legs and a fall confined him to bed. The trilogy - Eye Of
The Pyramid, Golden Apple, and Leviathan, all published in 1975 and
co-written with Robert Shea, who died in 1994 - grew out of their
experience as editors at Playboy, particularly from the Playboy Forum,
readers' letters which they answered and occasionally wrote. The
steady stream of conspiracy theories they received inspired them to
detail the battle of the Bavarian Illuminati, secret controllers of
the world, against the Discordians, whose embrace of chaos may have
owed more than a little to the paranoid uses of entropy in the fiction
of Thomas Pynchon.

Illuminatus brilliantly incorporated elements from the cult literature
of the time: borrowing elements of Colin Wilson, Philip K Dick (and
his SF pulp predecessors), Flann O'Brien, Carlos Casteneda, Timothy
Leary and Kurt Vonnegut in a mix both knowingly tongue-in-cheek and
pseudo-intellectually challenging. It was also funny. "My goal," said
Wilson, "is to try to get people into a state of generalised
agnosticism, not about God alone but agnosticism about everything."

Michael Carlson, Thursday January 18, 2007, The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1992779,00.html