As Predicted, Here’s Robert Anton Wilson

Not in the New York Times, as I had hoped, but this interview in Santa Cruz’s alternative weekly, Metroactive, is a good look at the twilight years of “the most ripped-off artist of our time,” who blazed the trail for everything from The Da Vinci Code to What the Bleep Do We Know? His email correspondents include LSD inventor Albert Hoffman: “”He’s a fan of my books, and I’m a fan of his drugs.”

I picked that link up from a site which also gave me a pointer towards Wilson’s answers to 23 more questions; the same article reports that the old trickster’s got at least one more book left in him, as Email to the Universe is…well, it’s probably a bit optimistic to say that it’ll be showing up in your local bookstore, unless there’s some really hip people running it or it also sells magickal paraphenalia on the side.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: if you really want a novel to blow your mind and make you question two millennia worth of received history, pick up Wilson’s Masks of the Illuminati. It’s been nearly twenty years since I first discovered a copy in my public library, and I’m still waking up with the shivers some nights.

21 August 2005 | interviews, uncategorized |