The Internet Review of Science Fiction : Vol. IV No. 3 : March,
2007     (Printable Obituary - Back to Web)

Robert Anton Wilson
by Ursula Pflug

Last year the dwarf planet UB313 almost succeeded in demoting Pluto
from planetary status. By September, in recognition of her boat-
rocking character, she received the name Eris, after the Greek
goddess. Around the time Eris was named, an aged Robert Anton Wilson
was ill, unable to pay his medical bills or for much else. I hope the
naming of UB313 gave him a much-needed smile. It is of course, from
RAW that many of us heard of Eris in the first place. He popularized
both the goddess of discord, and her religion/joke/religion,
Illuminatus! Trilogy, co-authored with Robert Shea and first published
in 1975.

Lovers of RAW's ideas might insist this was not coincidence, but a
cosmic wink from the goddess herself.

He did that too, much before anyone else. The re-discovery of the
divine feminine, which by now we've all heard so much about we
wouldn't mind a change of topic.

But back then, it was new. Remember, this was before new age, and its
many and varied re-visionings of the sacred. Wilson's Eris, was,
anyways, a pretty cool goddess, a bit of a brat, more than a little
wild. Alanis Morisette's highly entertaining portrayal of God in the
1999 film Dogma owed more than a little to Wilson's Eris.

It seems strange that there has been little or no mention of his death
on any of the SFnal lists or blogs I frequent, for Illuminatus!, while
hard to classify, definitely falls under the spec fic rubric. I
learned about his death because of a bulletin posted on MySpace by
Disinformation, where, as at Boing Boing, he is considered an
influential hero. There was little or no mention made in the
mainstream press either, beyond a brief New York Times obit. It is
only at Boing Boing that there are several posts by Mark Freuenfelder
about RAW's illness, his need for financial help (which came) and
finally, his passing in January. Freuenfelder goes so far as to call
him the patron saint of Boing Boing, and, indeed, RAW was a frequent
contributor back in the day when it was still a print operation.

Illuminatus! is a conspiracy novel about, well, almost everything,
and, unlike so many trilogies, actually fills its hundreds upon
hundreds of pages, and not just with repetitions of what happened
before, or pointless info-dumping. It's smart, it's funny, it makes
you wonder whether even a few of its author's multitudinous tongue-in-
cheek conspiracy theories might have some small basis in fact. Indeed,
it was a book ahead of its time.

Science fiction writers are supposed to ask the next question. That's
their job. Nowadays, so few do. This might account, partially, for the
oft-bemoaned greying of the readership. Young people are young, lest
we forget. They like asking difficult questions, not because they
expect answers, but because the questions are, well, there. Will
anyone write an Illuminatus! for today's kids?

And what is the question?

What is reality made of?

P.K. Dick asked this question over and over. So did Wilson. The
trilogy was followed by the just-as-famous memoir, which apparently
garnered Wilson more mail than all his other books combined. The
Cosmic Trigger is irreverent, exploratory, sometimes embarrassing,
sometimes hard to believe, in short all the things an honest
exposition of spiritual adventure ought to be. And writers don't flock
to it either, as they ought.

In Trigger, Wilson describes some very strange things that happened to
him during the course of, and following the writing of Illuminatus!
I've been at enough writers' gatherings where, late in the night,
secret confessions come out. You write something and something an
awful lot like it happens. If not to you, then to someone close by.
You meet someone who resembles one of your characters too closely for
comfort. There is this sense that, at times, writers are actually
playing with causality.

Poking it, just a little, with a thankfully very long stick.

The strange things that happen to Wilson are particularly odd, which
is not surprising considering his conjoined subject matter of
conspiracy theory and spiritual quest. Trigger's premise is that
reality is both mutable and plural, and that there are techniques by
which the psychonaut is able to breach the boundaries between
realities. Of course, the idea of a multi-verse has increasingly
received more than a passing nod from science.

Most interestingly, in his introduction, Wilson points out that the
content of Trigger is very similar to that of PK Dick's thinly
disguised autobiographical novel Valis, as well as that of Doris
Lessing's The Sirian Experiments, and that he discussed this
synchronicity with both writers. I've meant to read Valis for at least
a decade, and now have renewed motivation.

Just for fun, this excerpted from RAW's home page, under About
Wilson's Works:

The Chinese lifeform seldom secretly admires a demon near the fairy.
Wilson believes that the illuminatus about a movie theater knows the
dystopian eggplant, but he also considers how feverishly another
psychedelic subGenius hides. A homo Sapiens related to some geodesic
dome, a radioactive CEO, and a non-chalantly temporal wife are the
keys to illumination. When Wilson describes the grizzly bear of a
wife, it means that a non-Euclidian Emotional Plague procrastinates.
Wilson further extrapolates, the sexist dolphin takes a coffee break,
and a subGenius usually buries a Catholic trickster.
And beneath it:

Reload this page to get a slightly different essay.
Eris would approve.
I repeat: Wilson died poor, having, in his final days, to appeal to
his fans for help with the rent. Why is this still happening to once
lionized writers? And especially, and most sadly, to writers as
intelligent, funny and mind-fucking as RAW?

A memorial to the man's life and work was held on Sunday, February 18,
in Santa Cruz. The money from tickets was donated to Amnesty
International.

Good on ya, Bob.

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About Ursula Pflug
Ursula Pflug is author of the novel "Green Music." (Tesseract Books,
2002.)She is author or co-author of four and a half professionally
produced plays. She has published over fifty short stories in
professional venues, in print and on-lne, in Canada, the US and the
UK. Her non-fiction about books and art appears reularly in The
Peterbrough Examiner, the NYRSF, and other venues.