Wilson writes fiction in a style that seems to combine Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut with some Joseph Heller thrown in.
He's written a ton of stuff, none of which I have ever heard of before. He's had a career as a public speaker and has a lot of interesting things on YouTube. One of them is a video from the Libertarian Party's Presidential Nominating Convention in 1987. The talk is called "Politicians, Peptides, and Stupidity."
Wikipedia describes him (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Discordianism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Included are links to two of many books written by Wilson. One is "Prometheus Rising" an exposition of some of the philosophy embedded in his books.
The other actually three books: the Schrodinger's Cat trilogy, excerpted below to whet your appetite for his writing style and his weird way of looking at things:
BOOK ONE
The Universe Next Door
The majority of Terrans were six-legged. They had territorial squabbles and politics and wars and a caste system. They also had sufficient intelligence to survive on that barren boondocks planet for several billions of years.
We are not concerned here with the majority of Terrans. We are concerned with a tiny minority, the domesticated primates who built cities and wrote symphonies and invented things like tic-tac-toe and integral calculus. At the time of our story, these primates regarded themselves as the Terrans. The six-legged majority and other lifeforms on that planet hardly entered into their thinking at all, most of the time.The domesticated primates of Terra referred to the six-legged majority by an insulting name. They called them "bugs."
There was one species on Terra that lived in very close symbiosis with the domesticated primates. This was a variety of domesticated canines called dogs.
The dogs had learned to achieve a rough simulation of guilt and remorse and worry and other domesticated primate characteristics.
The domesticated primates had learned how to achieve simulations of loyalty and dignity and cheerfulness and other canine characteristics. The primates claimed that they loved the dogs as much as the dogs loved them. Still,
the primates kept the best food for themselves. The dogs noticed this, you can be sure, but they loved the primates so much that they forgave them.
One dog became famous. Actually he and she was a group of dogs, but they became renowned collectively as Pavlov's Dog.
.....
The use of atomic weapons was widely blamed on a primate named Albert Einstein. Even Einstein himself had agreed with this opinion. He was a pacifist and had suffered abominable pangs of conscience over what had been done with his scientific discoveries.
"I should have been a plumber," Einstein said just before he died.
Actually the discovery of atomic energy was the result of the work of every scientist, craftsman, engineer, technician, philosopher, and gadgeteer who had ever lived on Terra. The use of atomic energy as a weapon was the result of all the political decisions ever made, from the time the vertebrates first started competing for territory.
Most Terran primates did not understand the multiplex nature of causality. They tended to think everything had a single cause. This simple philosophic error was so widespread on that planet that the primates were all in the habit of giving themselves, and other primates, more credit than was deserved when things went well. This made them all inordinately conceited.
They also gave themselves, and one another, more blame than was deserved when things went badly. This gave them all jumbo-sized guilt complexes.
It is usually that way on primitive planets, before quantum causality is understood.
Quantum causality was not understood on Terra until physicists solved the
Schrödinger's Cat riddle.
Schrödinger's Cat never became as famous among the primate masses as Pavlov's Dog, but that was because the cat was harder to understand than the dog.
Pavlov's Dog could be understood in simple mechanical metaphors. To understand Schrödinger's Cat you needed to first understand the equations of quantum probability waves. Only a few primates were smart enough to read the equations, and even they couldn't understand them.
That was because the equations seemed to say that the cat was dead and alive at the same time.
Every character in this book looks like Pavlov's Dog from a certain angle. If you look at him or her a different way, however, you'll see Schrödinger's Cat
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