Back in the late ’80s, when Gnosis Magazine was just beginning to find its audience, we were lucky enough to have Robert Anton Wilson as one of our contributors. Over the span of six issues he contributed three major articles and one book review. Unfortunately, his enthusiasm cooled soon after that, as he was miffed that I’d written in a review of his Schrödinger’s Cat trilogy that it largely read like outtakes from the Illuminatus! Trilogy. It was my honest opinion, but RAW didn’t take kindly to such literary criticism.
It wasn’t until ten years later, in the fall of 1998, that he agreed to appear in Gnosis again, this time in an interview for our 50th issue. Little did we know then that #50 would be the next-to-last issue of the magazine. An unauthorized, OCR’d version of the interview is online, with all the little glitches that often creep in through OCR. Still, Wilson’s voice comes through loud and clear, amused and bemused by the perennial question: what is reality?
[Note: Copies of the back issue of Gnosis #50, in which RAW’s interview appeared, are available from Fields Books]
Here’s a link to the unauthorized version of the interview.