Publisher Description

The sequel to the cult classic The Illuminatus! Trilogy, this is an epic fantasy that offers a twisted look at our modern-day world--a reality that exists in another dimension of time and space that may be closer than we think.

Author Biography

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) was the author of some thirty-five books including Cosmic Trigger, Prometheus Rising, and the Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, and the co-author of the Illuminatus! Trilogy. He was a futurist, author, lecturer, stand-up comic, guerrilla ontologist, psychedelic magician, outer head of the Illuminati, quantum psychologist, Taoist sage, Discordian Pope, Struthian politician . . . maybe. He described his work as an "attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a new way, with different perspectives recognized as models or maps, and no one model elevated to the truth."

Excerpt from Book

BOOK ONE The Universe Next Door Not until the male become female and the female becomes male shall ye enter the Kingdom of Heaven. --Jesus, in The Gospel of Thomas PART ONE PURITY OF ESSENCE For the Cherub Cat is a term in the Angel Tiger --CHRISTOPHER SMART, Jubilate Agno DON''T LOOK BACK History is a nightmare from which none of us can awaken. --STEPHEN PROMETHEUS IN CARL JUNG''S Odysseus The majority of Terrans were six-legged. They had territorial squabbles and politics and wars and a caste system. They also had sufficient intelligence to survive on that barren boondocks planet for several billions of years. We are not concerned here with the majority of Terrans. We are concerned with a tiny minority--the domesticated primates who built cities and wrote symphonies and invented things like tic-tac-toe and integral calculus. At the time of our story, these primates regarded themselves as the Terrans. The six-legged majority and other life-forms on that planet hardly entered into their thinking at all, most of the time. The domesticated primates of Terra referred to the six-legged majority by an insulting name. They called them "bugs." There was one species on Terra that lived in very close symbiosis with the domesticated primates. This was a variety of domesticated canines called dogs. The dogs had learned to achieve a rough simulation of guilt and remorse and worry and other domesticated primate characteristics. The domesticated primates had learned how to achieve simulations of loyalty and dignity and cheerfulness and other canine characteristics. The primates claimed that they loved the dogs as much as the dogs loved them. Still, the primates kept the best food for themselves. The dogs noticed this, you can be sure, but they loved the primates so much that they forgave them. One dog became famous. Actually he and she was a group of dogs, but they became renowned collectively as Pavlov''s Dog. The thing about Pavlov''s Dog is that he or she or they responded mechanically to mechanically administered stimuli. Pavlov''s Dog caused some of the domesticated primates, especially the scientists, to think that all dog behavior was equally mechanical. This made them wonder about other mammals, including themselves. Most primates ignored this philosophical challenge. They went about their business assuming that they were not mechanical. The fact that plutonium was missing originally leaked to the press in the mid-1970s. At first there was a minor wave of panic among those given to worrying about such matters, and there was even some churlish grumbling about a government so incompetent that it couldn''t keep track of its own weapons of megadeath. But then a year passed, and another, and soon five years had passed, and then nearly a decade; and the missing plutonium was still missing but nothing really drastic had happened. Terran primates, being a simpleminded, sleepful race, simply stopped worrying about the subject. The triggering mechanism of the most destructive weapon ever devised on that backward planet was in unknown hands, true; but that was really not much more unsettling to contemplate than the fact that many of the known hands which had enjoyed access to plutonium belonged to persons who were not in all respects reasonable men. (See Terran Archives: Reagan, Ronald Wilson, career of.) The primate philosophy of that epoch was summed up by one of their popular heroes, Mr. Satchel Paige, in the aphorism, "Don''t look back--something might be gaining on you." It was a comfortable philosophy for sleep-loving people. The use of atomic weapons was widely blamed on a primate named Albert Einstein. Even Einstein himself had agreed with this opinion. He was a pacifist and had suffered abominable pangs of conscience over what had been done with his scientific discoveries. "I should have been a plumber," Einstein said just before he died. Actually the discovery of atomic energy was the result of the work of every scientist, craftsman, engineer, technician, philosopher, and gadgeteer who had ever lived on Terra. The use of atomic energy as a weapon was the result of all the political decisions ever made, from the time the vertebrates first started competing for territory. Most Terran primates did not understand the multiplex nature of causality. They tended to think everything had a single cause. This simple philosophic error was so widespread on that planet that the primates were all in the habit of giving themselves, and other primates, more credit than was deserved when things went well. This made them all inordinately conceited. They also gave themselves, and one another, more blame than was deserved when things went badly. This gave them all jumbo-sized guilt complexes. It is usually that way on primitive planets, before quantum causality is understood. Quantum causality was not understood on Terra until physicists solved the Schr

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