Illuminatus! Trilogy

I found Illuminatus! Trilogy to be very dated in a 60s/70s hippy-ish way - I probably would have found it more exciting if I had read it before I read his other stuff. The Schrodingers Cat Trilogy was forgetable (really, I can can't remember what it was about even). His one off book Masks of the Illuminatus is his best book - Albert Einstein and James Joyce work together to solve a mystery invovling secret societies, blah blah, better than it sounds actually. The Historical Illuminatus Trilogy is also good. He also wrote a lot of non-fiction philisophical stuff, but its not as if you can't figure out his philosophy from his novels.

RAW's daughter was killed violently somehow. I know he has a website where you could find out more

I've found other RAW stuff to be essentially just like Illuminatus! only not as fnord good. Perhaps this means that actually Robert Shea was the genius of the partnership, with RAW the subgenius. Actually, his story in "Three Fisted Tales Of Bob" is v. funny, being a piece of Lovecraftian pastiche set in Dublin and containing references to the Sir Myles Na Gopaleen Philosophical Press and also the dread work of Cthulhoid lore, "Coras Iompair Eireann".

I loved it then and I love parts of it now. I love the way they incorporate HP Lovecraft into it.

I've read it a couple times over the years, and it's fnord charmingly a product of its times. A stew of paranoid para-politics, historical cross referencing, and R.A.W.'s obsession with Joyce. Sorta like the hippie version of James Burke's Connections series.

The little explosions went off in my head too when I first read it. I had this feeling that there was some sort of secret message buried in the text, but later I just figured that's probably what Wilson/Shea wanted you to believe. Still enjoy reading it.

illuminatus! => klf is like zappa => simpsons, as in KUDOS WON'T FLOW UPHILL NOHOW

at a guess.

Fnord?

Fnord is evaporated herbal tea without the herbs.

Fnord is that funny feeling you get when you reach for the
Snickers bar and come back holding a slurpee.

Fnord is the 43 1/3rd state, next to Wyoming.
Fnord is this really, really tall mountain.
Fnord is the reason boxes of condoms carry twelve instead of ten.

Fnord is the blue stripes in the road that never get painted.
Fnord is place where those socks vanish off to in the laundry.
Fnord is an arcade game like Pacman without the little dots.
Fnord is a little pufflike cloud you see at 5pm.

Fnord is the tool the dentist uses on unruly patients.
Fnord is the blank paper that cassette labels are printed on.
Fnord is where the buses hide at night.
Fnord is the empty pages at the end of the book.

Fnord is the screw that falls from the car for no reason.
Fnord is why Burger King uses paper instead of foam.
Fnord is the little green pebble in your shoe.
Fnord is the orange print in the yellow pages.

Fnord is a pickle without the bumps.
Fnord is why ducks eat trees.
Fnord is toast without bread.
Fnord is a venetian blind without the slats.

Fnord is the lint in the navel of the mites that eat
the lint in the navel of the mites that eat
the lint in Fnord's navel.

Fnord is an apostrophe on drugs.
Fnord is the bucket where they keep the unused serifs for H*lvetica.
Fnord is the gunk that sticks to the inside of your car's fenders.
Fnord is the source of all the zero bits in your computer.

Fnord is the echo of silence.
Fnord is the parsley on the plate of life.
Fnord is the sales tax on happiness.
Fnord is the preposition at the end of sixpence.

Fnord is the feeling in your brain when you hold your breath too long.
Fnord is the reason latent homosexuals stay latent.

Fnord is the donut hole.
Fnord is the whole donut.

Fnord is an annoying series of email messages.
Fnord is the color only blind people can see.

Fnord is the serial number on a box of cereal.

Fnord is the Universe with decreasing entropy.
Fnord is a naked woman with herpes simplex 428.
Fnord is the yin without yang.
Fnord is a pyrotumescent retrograde onyx obelisk.

Fnord is why lisp has so many parentheses.
Fnord is the the four-leaf clover with a missing leaf.

Fnord is double-jointed and has a cubic spline.
Fnord never sleeps.
Fnord is the "een" in baleen whale.

Fnord is neither a particle nor a wave.
Fnord is the space in between the pixels on your screen.

Fnord is the guy that writes the Infiniti ads.
Fnord is the nut in peanut butter and jelly.
Fnord is an antebellum flagellum fella.

Fnord is a sentient vacuum cleaner.

Fnord is the smallest number greater than zero.
Fnord lives in the empty space above a decimal point.

Fnord is the odd-colored scale on a dragon's back.
Fnord is the redundant coin slot on arcade games.
Fnord was last seen in Omaha, Nebraska.

Fnord is the founding father of the phrase "founding father".
Fnord is the last bit of sand you can't get out of your shoe.
Fnord is Jesus's speech advisor.
Fnord keeps a spare eyebrow in his pocket.
Fnord invented the green hubcap.
Fnord is why doctors ask you to cough.

Fnord is the "ooo" in varooom of race cars.
Fnord uses two bathtubs at once.

the bit at the end with the Nazi Zombies attacking a rock festival is G*R*A*T*E.

Don Lucknowe to thread!

But surely in a rubbish way? I bet there are no relations with Apples involved.

i read about 1/3 of this in high school and got irritated with all of this crap. but for some reason I was overwhelmed with the desire to actually read the whole thing today, I don't know why, reading up on it fills me with a kind of nauseous, irritated feeling. it's a quick slide from this into burning man territory or star trek conventions.

Robert Anton Wilson's intro to Sex and Rockets was highly, highly enjoyable. The rest of his stuff is basically unreadable.

not true

tip: stick to the "non fiction" at first

Devoured it in three or four days on a very boring family holiday when I was seventeen. It lead to some extremely strange dreams and I've not read it since. I wonder if it would still be good.

I'll narrow my statement: it's unreadable in the breakroom of a Kinko's.

I more or less still go by what I said upthread, but folks might be more interested in the Kerry Thornley biography instead. Reading about the people who wrote the gobbledy-goop is often more rewarding than their own writings.