Mike Shea says:
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.
Q: 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.
