Hilaritas Press podcast with James Fadiman

Microdosing expert James Fadiman is the guest on the new Hilaritas podcast. Here is the blurb for the show: 

"Hilaritas host Mike Gathers talks with researcher, author, teacher, and consultant, Dr. James Fadiman. 

"Richard Alpert first turned Jim onto psilocybin in 1961.  Jim soon moved to Perry Lane, the Stanford Bohemian Quadrant which was ground zero for Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.  There in Menlo Park, Jim guided Stuart Brand on his first LSD experience.  He went on to help found the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology and continues to teach to this day. Jim wrote the Psychedelic Explorers Guide Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys in 2011, and has co-written with his friend Jordan Gruber, Microdosing for Health, Healing and Advanced Performance, and Your Symphony of Selves: Discover and Understand More of who we are.."

James Fadiman’s website: https://www.jamesfadiman.com/

Institute of Transpersonal Psychology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofia_University_(California)

Host Mike Gathers:https://linktr.ee/mgathers23

Producer/Engineer Richard Rasa: http://www.pelorian.com/rasa.html

New 'D. Scott Apel Resources' area on this website

D. Scott Apel's most popular book 

D. Scott Apel collaborated with Robert Anton Wilson on RAW's newsletter Trajectories, resulting in two books, Chaos and Beyond and Beyond Chaos and Beyond, but Scott is an interesting writer in his own right. 

So, on the right side of this page, just below the "Robert Anton Wilson Resources" and "Robert Shea Resources" sections, I've created a new "D. Scott Apel Resources" section. So far, those links include three interviews of Scott I conducted her, observations on some of his book titles, and the only complete and accurate bibliography of his books (that I know of) available on the internet. I just added the Hilaritas Press podcast interview with Scott.

I have other items in the works that I'll be adding in the coming weeks. 

Scott is less organized in self promotion than many other creators -- there's no official author page -- so I decided to set this up. 

John Higgs news roundup

John Higgs has released a new edition of his Octannual Update newsletter. 

Lots of interesting events in Britain to go to, so if you live there you should read the whole thing, but I will highlight a couple of items of global interest.

The paperback of John's Exterminate/Regenerate: The Story of Doctor Who is about to be released. It's only published in Britain, but John explains how you can order an autographed copy from a business that ships worldwide.

Also, the Mycelium Parish News has just been published, a bit late this time. As John explains, "This is a catalogue of that year’s books, podcasts, fanzines, mailing lists, events etc, that come from alternative or Discordian- adjacent creators. There’s a micro-essay from me in there also." I have just ordered my copy.  

Martin Wagner relaunches 'Robert Anton Wilson Archives'

Martin Wagner's online collection of Robert Anton Wilson materials was offline for a bit, but he has now launched the revamped Robert Anton Wilson Archives website.

It looks great and it has a lot of interesting material to read. Martin's site and RAWilsonfans.org both deserve your attention as collections of RAW material (and I like to  think there's  a few things to read here, too). 

The new link for "Robert Anton Wilson Archives" is now up under "Robert Anton Wilson Resources" at the right side of this page. 

Sehr gut, Martin! 

New RAW images at RAW Semantics

 

Over at RAW Semantics, Brian has posted new images of Robert Anton Wilson, both art images and enhanced photos. He's getting really good at this. 

Brian says:

"A mix of some 'new' photos, repurposed (and quality-improved) old video stills and some of my attempts at artwork. The subject, of course, is Robert Anton Wilson, who I would argue – and despite the efforts of RAW fans – generally doesn’t seem well-served by images of his likeness (good quality source images being few – the web is populated instead with blurred low-res video grabs). I’ve added a boring technical note below the images, for people who like that kind of thing."

New podcasts: Grant Morrison and Mike Gathers

 Grant Morrison has appeared on a recent episode of Douglas Rushkoff's "Team Human" podcast. Bobby Campbell recommends it as an especially great conversation. See Bobby's art above. 

The Non Serviam podcast, episode 74, features Mike Gathers. He's interviewed by Lucy Steigerwald.

"For NSP 74, we spoke with Mike Gathers about the politics of Robert Anton Wilson!

In addition, we talked about libertarianism, techno-optimism, the limits of the left-right spectrum, and Mike's recently published book with Hilaritas Press titled, A Non Euclidian Perspective: Robert Anton Wilson’s Political Commentaries 1960-2005 containing many previously published political articles and interviews of RAW."

I've provided YouTube links, but both should be on most podcasting apps. 

Bonus news: Afroman won. 

Al Zuckerman, star literary agent who represented Wilson and Shea, has died [UPDATED]

 

Dan Brown said this book "changed my life." 

Prominent literary agent Albert Zuckerman has died. He played a big role in the careers of both Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, although they were  hardly his most famous clients.

As Clay Risen explains in his typically excellent New York Times obituary for Zuckerman, Zuckerman had many big successes, including boosting the career of Ken Follett:

"He had a knack for finding promising writers who, with a few pointers, could become rock stars. His first big score was with Mr. Follett, a Welsh novelist who wrote about the English working class until he hired Mr. Zuckerman, who encouraged him to write a thriller instead.

"The result, Eye of the Needle (1978), won an Edgar Award for best novel, sold briskly in Britain and the United States, and cemented Mr. Follett’s reputation as a bankable writer. His books have since sold nearly 200 million copies, and helped make Mr. Zuckerman, as The Irish Independent described it in a 1994 profile, 'the hero of the blockbuster'.”

Zuckerman also had a hand in A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (25 million copies sold of a book about physics). Zuckerman wrote Writing the Blockbuster Novel, cited as a big influence by Dan Brown. 

But of course my main interest in Zuckerman was the role in played as Wilson and Shea's agent. He was not involved in selling Illuminatus! to Dell, but after that work's success, he became their agent.

I spoke to Zuckerman briefly in 2012, here is part of that blog post: "Zuckerman told me that he sold all of Wilson and Shea's subsequent novels, but that the two had sold Illuminatus! on their own, without using an agent."

Dell editor Fred Feldman, one of the editors who worked on Illuminatus!, introduced Wilson and Shea to Zuckerman. It was early in Zuckerman's career, as Feldman told me in my 2013 interview with the editor:

"Now, of course today, Al is one of the premiere agents in the business. He had a new client at that time, a young untested British guy by the name of Ken Follett. That seems to have worked out for them. Of course, Al has many other very important clients, a thriving agency, Writer’s House, and I think is a patriarch of the business at this point.

"But at the time, he didn’t have any clients. At the time, believe it or not, I’d sometimes vacate my office for a little time so he could use my phone. It was just a different time. He was just starting out. He got his first office, Writer’s House, and I remember going over to see it, I was so pleased. He’s older than me. He came from an academic background.

"But anyway, I introduced them both. I remember Bob Shea remembered doing a couple of historic Japanese sagas with Al that did very well, and then I kind of lost track of him."

I shared the news about Zuckerman yesterday with Mike Shea, Robert Shea's son. 

"My dad loved him a lot. I worked with Al regularly as well as my dad’s heir," Mike told me. 

"My dad really was in awe of him and changed a *lot* of what he did based on Al’s guidance. Shike was supposed to be a science fiction novel!"

Shike was Shea's first novel. It was written during a tough time in Shea's life. He had been laid off by Playboy magazine, a circumstance which got Shea to finally get serious about a career as a novelist. As Feldman relates, Shike was a big success and allowed Shea to pursue a career as a novelist until his death. 

Here is an anecdote from Dan Brown:

"Not long ago, I had an amusing experience meeting the author of a book I received as a gift nearly two decades ago — a book that in many ways changed my life. Almost 20 years ago, I was halfway through writing my first novel, Digital Fortress, when I was given a copy of Writing the Blockbuster Novel, by the legendary agent Albert Zuckerman. His book helped me complete my manuscript and get it published. Two months ago, by chance, I met Mr. Zuckerman for the first time. I gratefully told him that he had helped me write Digital Fortress. He jokingly replied that he planned to tell everyone that he had helped me write The Da Vinci Code.”

F. Paul Wilson (Repairman Jack novels, The Keep) has a nice piece up about Zuckerman:

"After my third novel, he said I needed to expand my horizons: Send him three ideas I’d like to work on, and we’ll choose. We settled on one set in WWII with a Romanian castle and a strange, malignant occupant.  I wrote it in about six months. Al was impressed, but said it needed work. So he got to work. His notes and edits shed new light on the book and I wrote the second draft with them in mind. The book was transformed. But Al wasn’t through yet. He decided to approach Hollywood before the publishers. It worked: We had a movie deal before he put the book up for auction.  It landed on the NY Times bestseller list.  And that is why The Keep is dedicated to Al Zuckerman."

UPDATE: If you want to get going on your bestselling novel, Amazon is selling a Kindle of Zuckerman's book for $3. 

Followups!

Brian Doherty. (Facebook photo. Source). 

1. Two interesting new pieces have been posted about Brian Doherty since I ran the obituary Sunday. Nick Gillespie has written a remembrance: "On the way out of the talk, as valets pulled up our old, beat-up cars (mine a Toyota Tercel with 200,000 miles on it and a padlock on the trunk, his a decrepit Ford LTD station wagon he'd bought from Jacob Sullum), Brian mentioned to me that what he really liked about capitalism wasn't the way it punished anyone but just how many free riders it enabled."

Also, a new piece by Bryan Caplan, longer and better than what I linked to Sunday.

2. I got a comment some days ago that the links to Robert Anton Wilson's "Serpent Power" piece on this site were all dead links. I think I've fixed it and the link  under "Feature Articles and Interviews" on the right side of this page now works.

3. I also recently blogged about RAW meeting Ted Sturgeon, the famous science fiction writer. Sturgeon's More Than Human currently is a $2 Kindle ebook. Still $9 as a Nook ebook at Barnes and Nobel, unfortunately.

4. When Dan Simmons died, I ran a notice and complained that the New York Times did not run an obit.  An obituary has now in fact finally run.  I still think the paper should have run one for Greg Bear. 

'One Battle After Another' wins six Oscars

 Paul Thomas Anderson (Creative Commons photo, source.)

I didn't watch the Oscars last night; I was busy watching the U.S. national team defeat the Dominican Republic in the World Baseball Classic. However, I can still report that One Battle After Another, based on Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, won six awards, including best picture and best director.  Of course, we had an online discussion group about the novel at this blog, and you can still access it on the right side of this page. 

Brian Doherty has died

Brian Doherty. Facebook photo posted by Sherry Wong). 

Brian Doherty, 57, has died. He was the top modern historian of libertarianism, but also a genuine expert on Robert Anton Wilson, as I will remind everyone shortly.

Here is the obituary at Reason magazine, where he was a senior editor, working with other libertarian RAW fans such as Jesse Walker. The review gives full credit to his scholarship --- he wrote a long book called Radicals for Capitalism that is the definitive history of modern capitalism and also has material putting Robert Anton Wilson's politics in context with the libertarian movement -- but check out how he got interested in libertarianism: "Born in Brooklyn and raised mostly in Florida, Doherty first caught the libertarian bug at age 12 by gobbling up the Illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson." 

The Reason obituary by Matt Welch delves into Doherty's libertarian scholarship and journalism but also has lots of details about how Doherty founded a record label and played in various rock bands, and his interest in avant-garde art happenings, Burning Man,  underground comix and other pursuits. 

It's perhaps not the most important thing about him, but Doherty wrote one of the best guest posts ever published on this blog. "Robert Anton Wilson: A Conspiracy of Silence?" is a piece which Doherty originally hoped to publish in the New York Times Book Review. He gave me permission for me to run it in July 2015.  It's very good, please take a look. 

See also that when Hilaritas Press published A Non-Euclidian Perspective, a new collection of RAW's political writings, Jesse Walker assigned Doherty to review the book. 

I hope some of you will go ahead and read Doherty's RAW piece published on this blog. I could not remember how I got my hands on it, so I checked my email. 

One of my best blog posts here is my "Illuminatus! vs. Cryptonomicon" post, listing various parallels between the two works. I got a few nice comments, but in general I was a little disappointed it did not make more of a splash.

But I did get a nice email from Mr. Doherty, who wrote, "Very smart and thorough comparison of the two; I noted a much more casual resemblance between the two when desperately, and in the end fruitlessly, trying to convince an imagined NY TIMES BOOK REVIEW audience that they should give RAW a second thought.

"On his death I queried NYTBR about writing an appreciation essay on RAW; they said yes to the idea but rejected the actual essay, which was written in a rush and without much time to re-read RAW, and I think I was too scrupulously trying to connect him to "important" lit stuff. Or I just did a shitty job. At any rate, I append the still unpublished essay in case you are interested. (Nothing for a serious fan or scholar to learn from it, of course.)"

Of course I was pleased to get his feedback, but I also liked the attachment. Naturally, I immediately asked if I could run it, noting that he might still be trying to sell it and might have a better place for it, and he replied, "Oh, that piece is completely dead as anything sellable; if you think it has anything to offer the specialist audience at your site, please run it, I'd be delighted."

So I ran it. Mr. Doherty asked only, "If you choose to run it, do note the purpose for which it was written: to explain RAW to the generalist audience at NYTBR on the occasion of his death."

Here is a post on Facebook by Sherry Wong.  Bryan Caplan has posted an appreciation of Doherty's magnum opus.  I learned about the bad news when I saw Jesse Walker's posting on Facebook.  There's also an appreciation by Nick Gillespie,  and one from Sheldon Richman. 

When Bob met Ted, and notes on 'Famedroppings'

 

During his lifetime, science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985) was known as a "writer's writer," revered by other writers and also very respected by the more literate science fiction fans. He is probably best known for his book More Than Human. Older science fiction fans still read. He was a renowned short story writer, and I read Sturgeon's Selected Stories in 2019.  Mark Brown read Sturgeon's Venux Plus X a few months ago. 

D. Scott Apel's Famedroppings, a memoir of his encounters with famous people, he describes how he arranged for RAW to meet with Sturgeon. The two writers were fans of each other -- RAW once said, "My favorite science fiction writers have long been Stapledon, Heinlein, Clarke and Sturgeon" -- and the pair had a nice meetup. 

As for Famedroppings, it don't see it as a major Apel work, but the Kindle is only about $2, and you can get your money's worth skimming  it and reading the entries about the people you are interested in. Apel's reflections at the back of the book also are worth a read. There is a really good section on Philip K. Dick, more substantial than many of the entries. There's also a biographical essay on RAW, although it's a shorter version of what Scott wrote in Beyond Chaos and Beyond. The more than 100 entries are divided into actors, directors, Star Trek figures, businessmen, politicians, public intellectuals, musicians, disk jockeys, astronauts, scientists, "specialty acts," vehicles, women "best known for displaying the proof they are women", writers and "I Am Known by Them." "L'Envoi: Why? Three Cautionary Tales" is the piece at the back of the book I recommend reading, even if you only skim the rest of the book for the good parts. 

Incidentally, the book may make you think about the nature of fame. Apel writes that he almost left out Sturgeon for not being famous enough, although for me, a science fiction fan, Sturgeon is much more "famous" that the actors he mentions I never heard of. 

Back in Dublin with Peter Quadrino

 

Sandycove, Dublin. Peter Quadrino photo

In  new post for his Finnegans, Wake! blog, Peter Quadrino posts "So This is Dyoublong? Living Inside the World of the Wake: Part 3," explaining, "Continuing my American-spectator-in-Ireland, wandering psychogeographical exploration of Finnegans Wake and relevant sites, jumping around the map of Dublin and the Emerald Isle, recalling my time staying there a few years back."

Peter has lots of photo illustrations. If you want to read the posts in order, here is part one, and here is part two. 

D. Scott Apel Bibliography

[This is the only accurate, complete bibliography for D. Scott Apel that I know of. A link to this is available at the new "D. Scott Apel Resources" section on the right side of this page. Books are available at Barnesandnoble.com and at Amazon.]

Bibliography: D. Scott Apel

Including initial publication/copyright dates

PRINT MEDIA

FICTION

Alec Smart Comic Mysteries

The Uncertainty Principle? (1979, 2015) (Footnote 1)
The Infinite Mistress (2014)
Detective, Comics (2015)
Jobs of Work (2023)
Hollywood, Ending (2023)

Stand-alone novels 

Exemplary Lives of Impossible Men (2021)
Unfriendly Takeover at OzCo: A Fairy Tale for Aging Children (2025)
E Attraction (Limited Author’s Edition) (1976)
Escape from 50sville (2021) (editor) (Footnote 2)

Humor

Mein Summer Kampf (2014)

Plays

Fourplay (2018) (Footnote 3)

NON-FICTION

Scholarship on authors (Editor and Contributor)

Science Fiction: An Oral History (2014)
Philip K. Dick: The Dream Connection (1987)
Beyond Chaos and Beyond: The Best of Trajectories, Vol. 2 (uncollected Robert Anton Wilson writings) (2019) (Two editions, Apel's original edition and the 2025 Hilaritas Press edition)

Memoirs

NO PLAN B: The Adventures of a Carbon Unit in Silicon Valley (2020)
Famedroppings (2018)

Movie reviews (Footnote 4)

Freelance video columnist for the San Jose Mercury News (1985-1995); published 534 consecutive weekly columns and more than 50 feature articles

Published more than 200 articles on film and video in numerous newspapers and magazines (including Video and Video Review)

Contributing Editor at Reel.com (1996-2005) writing over 1,000 movie synopses for its film database, more than two dozen articles for its online editorial content, and more than a dozen reviews of current films as a film critic. Also developed several courses for Reel U., the world’s first online film school

Killer B’s, Volume 1 (1980-1996): The 237 Best Movies on Demand You’ve (Probably) Never Seen
Killer B’s, Volume 2: Son of a Killer B (1996-2016): 237 MORE Great Movies On Demand You’ve (Probably) Never Seen
Killer B’s: The Hive: The 487 Best Movies* On Demand You’ve (Probably) Never Seen *(and a few TV Shows) (2016)
Killer B’s Action & Thriller: 123 Great Action Movies On Demand You’ve (Probably) Never Seen (Killer B’s Movie Guides)
Killer B’s Comedy: Mild: 101 Quietly Comic M ovies On Demand You’ve (Probably) Never Seen (Killer B’s Movie Guides)
Killer B’s Comedy: Wild: 101 Insane Comedy Movies On Demand You’ve (Probably) Never Seen (Killer B’s Movie Guides)
Killer B’s: Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Horror: 113 Great Imaginative Movies On Demand You’ve (Probably) Never Seen (Killer B’s Movie Guides)
Killer B’s: Drama: 117 Great Dramatic Movies On Demand You’ve (Probably) Never Seen (Killer B’s Movie Guides)

Screenplays (unproduced) (Footnote 5)

Big Talk (1990)
Such a Deal! (1991)
If I Knew Then (1986)
Sleep of Reason (with Will Jacobs) (1992) 

Unpublished Novels

Daughter of the Wind (1980)
A Night at the Space Opera (1981)

THEATER

“A Night in the Graveyard” (1991)
“Trouble Is My Career Path” (1992)
“Me and My Shadow” (1992)
“Pledge Night!” (1993)

(All collected in the volume Fourplay)

VISUAL MEDIA (Footnote 6)

Film Roles (per IMDb) 

Night Terror (1989)
Almost Hollywood (1994)
The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick (2001)
Maybe Logic: The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson (2003)

Television

“The Prisoner” Wraparounds (1985-1996), KTEH-TV, PBS for Silicon Valley
VJ/Host “Sunday Science Fiction Night” (1990-1996), KTEH-TV, PBS for Silicon Valley

FOOTNOTES:

1) You ask about the double copyright date on The Uncertainty Principle? While this is legally unnecessary, I wanted to add the date of the first version (entitled The Coincidence Caper at that point) to establish that I’d been working on that book for 35 years before publishing it. I also wanted to make sure no one could come around and say, “Oh, you stole that plot/character/scene/location from a novel published in 1980/85/90 (or whatever.)” Just a touch ultraparanoid (like most authors), but I do want credit for being there first, in case anyone finds similarities between UP? and anything published since 1979. I didn’t bother to do this with the two sequels (The Infinite Mistress and Detective, Comics), both of which were written in the 1980s (but unpublished until the 20-teens), or Science Fiction: An Oral History, which was compiled in 1978, since the dates of the interviews are included in the book.

2) Escape from ‘50sville is a novel “written by Casey Bragg,” who is a character in my novel Exemplary Lives of Impossible Men. A sample of the work of each writer in Exemplary Lives is included in that book, except for one by “Bragg.” I simply had no detective story to include as an example of his work. But when I foraged my files for something I could use, I came across a file of notes for 50sville that I’d shelved in the late ‘80s, since there were plot problems I couldn’t solve at that time. But when I read the notes 30 years later, the solutions became immediately apparent, and I decided to write 50sville as a “lost novel” by Casey Bragg. (The backstory becomes clearer if one reads Exemplary Lives.) So I take credit as the editor of this novel but attribute its creation to one of my characters. I love fun author shit like this.

3) Fourplay consists of two three-act plays and three one-act plays, all of which (except one one-act) were produced in the early 1990s by Stage One, a theatrical training and performance organization in San Jose, Calif. 

4) A few additional notes: I don’t really count the genre film guides as separate books, as they are collections of the genre entries lifted directly from the two volumes of Killer B’s rather than original writing. (My theory was that if readers were reluctant to purchase the full KB books from an unknown film critic, they might opt for less expensive volumes focused on their specific genre interests. To date, I don’t believe a single copy of any of these genre guides have ever been purchased.) I don’t count The Hive either, since it contains the contents of KB 1 & 2 combined into a single volume rather than being original writing.

5) I’ve also included unpublished/unproduced works.

6) I’m including my film and TV work, since I wrote my appearances.