He was in Norton’s Emporium, a glorified 5 & 10 ¢ store, when he saw the sign: His first overt act began in Dayton the following Saturday. He would be a random factor in every equation from this day forward, unto death, it would be civil war: the Midget versus the Digits….

Once and for all, beyond fantasy, in the depth of his soul he declared war on the “statuatory ape,” on law and order, on predictability, on negative entropy. He would have revenge…ĭamn the science of mathematics itself, the line, the square, the average, the whole measurable world that pronounced him a bizarre random factor.

It was bad enough to be, by the standards of the gigantic and stupid majority, a freak how much worse to be so named as to remind these big oversized clods of the cinema’s two most famous portrayers of monstro-freaks by the time the Midget was fifteen, he had built up a detestation for ordinary mankind that dwarfed (he hated that word) the relative misanthropies of Paul of Tarsus, Clement of Alexandria, Swift of Dublin and even Robert Putney Drake. The popularity of the word 'fnord' and the 23 enigma can both be attributed to the trilogy.The Midget, whose name was Markoff Chaney, was no relative of the famous Chaneys of Hollywood, but people did keep making jokes about that. Illuminatus! has been adapted for the stage, as an audio book and has influenced several modern writers, artists, musicians, and games-makers. The authors went on to write several works, both fiction and nonfiction, that dealt further with the themes of the trilogy, but they did not write any direct sequels. In 1986 the trilogy won the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award, designed to honor libertarian science fiction. In 1984 they were published as an omnibus edition and are now more commonly reprinted in the latter form. The parts were first published as three separate volumes starting in September 1975. The trilogy comprises three parts which contain five books and appendices: The Eye in the Pyramid (first two books), The Golden Apple (third and part of fourth book), Leviathan (part of fourth and all of fifth book, and the appendices). It is thematically dense, covering topics like counterculture, numerology, and Discordianism.

The narrative often switches between third- and first-person perspectives in a nonlinear narrative. The trilogy is a satirical, postmodern, science fiction-influenced adventure story a drug-, sex-, and magic-laden trek through a number of conspiracy theories, both historical and imaginary, related to the authors' version of the Illuminati. The Illuminatus! Trilogy is a series of three novels by American writers Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, first published in 1975.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea