Publication Order of Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy Books
The Universe Next Door
1979
The Trick Top Hat
1980
The Homing Pigeons
1981
Publication Order of Historical Illuminatus Chronicles Books
The Earth Will Shake
1982
The Widow’s Son
1985
Nature’s God
1991
Publication Order of Cosmic Trigger Books
Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati
1977
Cosmic Trigger II: Down to Earth
1991
Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death
1995
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
The Sex Magicians
1973
Masks of the Illuminati
1981
Publication Order of Plays
Wilhelm Reich in Hell
1987
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
Playboy’s Book of Forbidden Words
1972
Sex and Drugs: A Journey Beyond Limits / Sex, Drugs and Magick: A Journey Beyond Limits
1973
The Book of the Breast / Ishtar Rising
1974
Neuropolitics (With: Timothy Leary, George Koopman)
1978
The Game of Life (With: Timothy Leary)
1979
The Illuminati Papers
1980
Prometheus Rising
1983
Right Where You Are Sitting Now
1983
The New Inquisition
1986
Natural Law, or Don’t Put a Rubber on Your Willy
1987
Coincidance: A Head Test
1988
Quantum Psychology
1990
Chaos and Beyond
1994
Everything Is Under Control: Conspiracies, Cults and Cover-Ups (With: Miriam Joan Hill)
1998
TSOG: The Thing That Ate the Constitution
2002
Email to the Universe and Other Alterations of Consciousness
2005
Beyond Chaos and Beyond
2019
The Starseed Signals
2020
Lion of Light: Robert Anton Wilson on Aleister Crowley
2023
A Non-Euclidean Perspective
2025
About Robert Anton Wilson
Robert Anton Wilson (18 January 1932 to 11 January 2007) was an American novelist, essayist and futurist, best known as the co-author, with Robert Shea, of “The Illuminatus! Trilogy” (1975), a satirical science fiction adventure built out of conspiracy theories. He also wrote two further fiction trilogies and a long shelf of non-fiction on consciousness, the occult and what he called quantum psychology.
He was born Robert Edward Wilson in Brooklyn, New York, and had polio as a child. After Brooklyn Technical High School he studied engineering and mathematics at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute without taking a degree, and began working as a freelance journalist and advertising copywriter in the late 1950s. He took his maternal grandfather’s name, Anton, for his writing. From 1965 to 1971 he was an associate editor at Playboy, where he and Shea edited the Playboy Forum letters section.
Wilson and Shea drew much of the stranger material in “Illuminatus!” from letters sent to the magazine. The three volumes, “The Eye in the Pyramid”, “The Golden Apple” and “Leviathan”, were written to poke fun at the conspiratorial frame of mind, and they popularised Discordianism and the word “fnord”. The trilogy won the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award in 1986, and Ken Campbell turned it into a ten-hour stage production that played at the National Theatre in London in 1977.
The “Schrödinger’s Cat” trilogy (1979 to 1981) reuses several of the same characters, with each book illustrating a different interpretation of quantum physics. “Masks of the Illuminati” (1981) puts Albert Einstein, James Joyce and Aleister Crowley into a fictional plot. “The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles” follow Sigismundo Celine, a young Neapolitan, through Enlightenment Europe and on to America; a promised fourth volume was never written.
His non-fiction includes the partly autobiographical “Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati” (1977) and its two sequels, “Prometheus Rising” (1983), which he reworked from his doctoral dissertation, and “Quantum Psychology” (1990). Wilson died in Capitola, California. Hilaritas Press, the publishing house of the Robert Anton Wilson Trust, has since reissued his books and published previously unseen work, including “The Starseed Signals” (2020), which was written in 1974.
