Robert Shea, Illuminatus! co-author
The author of the Cleveland Okie blog sent me some questions about my father, Robert J. Shea, the co-author of the Illuminatus! trilogy with Robert Anton Wilson. I thought you might be interested to learn a little of the other half of the Shea / Wilson team.More information about Bob Shea and his work, including a Creative Commons licensed copy of his book, All Things Are Lights, is available at bobshea.net.
LinkQ: Supposedly the idea for ILLUMINATUS! came from when your father and Robert Anton Wilson were sitting in a bar after work in Chicago, and your father suggested that it would be funny to write a novel that took seriously all the various crackpot conspiracy theories that were sent in to the Playboy Forum, which your father edited. Did your father ever give you his version of this story?
A: Yep, a lot of the themes in ILLUMINATUS came from when RAW and he worked at Playboy on the adviser. All of the crazy conspiracy theories gave them the idea to write a book that tied them all together. He never gave me his side of the story, really, but he didn't believe in all the conspiracy theories. He was pretty practical. He never trusted the government, however (who can blame him?), so he wouldn't put something past them like the Kennedy assassination, but he never really got too bent about it all. He was very scientific in his thought and believed in Occam's razor: the simplest explanation is likely the right one.
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The Illuminatus Trilogy was/is one of my all time favourite book/s (just bought yet another copy - still excellent) and whilst RAW took the ideas and ran them into the ground in a series of ever less readable 'sequels' IMHO it was Bob Shea's input that makes them the classics they should be heralded as...
Ah, thank you for sharing more on Robert Shea. All good genuises need to be revealed at some point, to enlighten all of us with their stories, real and imagined.
However, regarding Occam's razor, it is sharp and often cuts two ways.
To bring it down to one of the most simple arguments against it, I'll lift the following straight from wikipedia:
Francis Crick has commented on potential limitations of Occam's razor in biology. He advances the argument that because biological systems are the products of (an on-going) natural selection, the mechanisms are not necessarily optimal in an obvious sense. He cautions: "While Ockham's razor is a useful tool in the physical sciences, it can be a very dangerous implement in biology. It is thus very rash to use simplicity and elegance as a guide in biological research."
As Charles Fort said: "One measures a circle, beginning anywhere."
I'm of the mind that Shea found much beyond the blade of Occam's razor, although, of course, that's a good place to begin.
But what do I know? I'll trust his son over the government, any day. :-)
All Things Are Lights is one of the great books of the 20th century. I'm glad that it's online!
The idea of combining all of the crackpot conspiracy theories reminds me of Umberto Eco's excellent, if dense, book Foulcault's Pendulum. BEWARE SPOILERS ON THE WIKIPEDIA LINK, btw.
I have never read another writer writing so admirably about a friend as Bob Wilson did in Cosmic Trigger III: Life After Death. Bob and Bob, what a pair.
not to judge a book by it's cover, but that book cover is a crime... too bad.
Snackcake, it was a perfectly good cover in its day.