I haven't read this, Zonark. Do you recommend it? Just because men in black suits are following me, and my movements are being monitored through my smallpox vaccination, doesn't mean I'm paranoid, however.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy is recognized as the seminal work that spawned the conspiracy theory fiction genre.
It's a bit over the top with the sex and violence and definitely very zany in how it's presented but what I find most enjoyable about it, is that it never takes itself too seriously (as was Wilson's style). It makes so many references to actual conspiracy theories and occult mysteries that I've probably only sussed out less than half of them and it weaves them all together brilliantly in a most bizarre, contradictory, humorous and subjective way. I read it as a teenager and it had an unhealthily significant impact on my thinking
Wilson is the original conspiracy fantasy author. He certainly doesn't get the appreciation or credit he deserves for it. He's also written a bit of philosophy and psychology at a time when his thoughts on such things as quantum discoveries impacts on the psyche where absolute genius, far before these watered down, cult fueled documentaries and New Age books like What The Bleep Do We Know? and The Secret. I haven't read Dan Brown's books, but I'm confident that he's got nothing on Wilson. I'm even more confident he's simply not as funny.
The humor is at times very self referential too, for instance within the book there is a review lambasting it;
"It's a dreadfully long monster of a book, [...] and I certainly won't have time to read it, but I'm giving it a thorough skimming. The authors are utterly incompetent—no sense of style or structure at all. It starts out as a detective story, switches to science-fiction, then goes off into the supernatural, and is full of the most detailed information of dozens of ghastly boring subjects. And the time sequence is all out of order in a very pretentious imitation of
Faulkner and
Joyce. Worst yet, it has the most raunchy sex scenes, thrown in just to make it sell, I'm sure, and the authors—whom I've never heard of—have the supreme bad taste to introduce real political figures into this mishmash and pretend to be exposing a real conspiracy. You can be sure I won't waste time reading such rubbish."
Nothing conspiratorial about it.
