To submit your reader review, just send 300 words as a text document on the last thing you read, new or old, sci-fi, fantasy, comic-book or horror, to james.hoare@imagine-publishing.co.uk, and it could not only appear here but might make it into the magazine!
The Illuminatus! Trilogy
Author: Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson Publisher: Doubleday
Release Date: 6 October 1998 Price: OOP (from £2.39 used)
And so here is the book that started it all. Conspiracy buffs take note; all within is a 100% real, or not.
Illuminatus! is a hefty tome that has infected countless books, films and popular culture since it’s mind blowing arrival in 1975. Rightly hailed as a counter culture classic, it remains as breath taking and relevant today as it did back then. Often compared to Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, this is not an easy book to come to terms with. The action jumps at will between characters, time and first or third person narrative; often within the same sentence. Heroes could be villains, villains heroes and the scenes unfolding before your eyes may be real, false or just drug induced fantasy.
Blending sci-fi, fantasy, politics and real science into a heady mix of real and fake historical fact, the book treats you as an intelligent and open reader. The truth is left to you to decide. There is little black or white but a whole load of psychedelic colour and shade for you to navigate your way through.
Beginning as a police investigation into the bombing of a radical magazine and the disappearance of its editor, the story soon veers off into a quest for truth and the identity of our planets secret rulers. Yellow submarines and ancient civilisations abound. Alien interference and talking apes jostle for space with surviving war criminals and dark, lovecraftian mythology.
This journey is not for the weak.
Shot through with dark, quite ludicrous humour and copious amounts of sex and drug use, this is not a book for those comfortable in the tried and staid conventions of mainstream fiction. It is, however, a joy and a rare treat for those willing to expand both their library and mind.
