Discussion: 'All Things Are Lights'

What "is" the "best" novel of Robert Shea? Opinions differ!

Eric Wagner loved Shike but was a bit disappointed by All Things Are Lights, as he says in the comment for this blog post. 

Mike Shea, in this interview, thinks that his father's favorite book probably was Shaman: "I think SHAMAN. He was really into that book. It was a book that let him really dig into the history, drive all over the country, and learn about the subject matter. He never got to do that with his other historical books."

My favorite remains All Things Are Lights (with the caveat that I still haven't read the second Shike  novel yet, I will read it in June). 

I do have one ally: the late Patricia Monaghan, Shea's widow, who told me in a 2011 email, "All Things are Lights is my favorite of Bob's books."

I told Professor Monaghan that I'm very fond of the book and that I think of it as a kind of prequel to Illuminatus! She wrote back, 

"I'm glad you like All Things, which is such a terrific book.  You are right in the 'prequel' idea in that Bob's interest in secret societies and such folded over from Ill! to All Things, but there was not direct connection.  What drove Bob as an historical novelist was an interest in the underdogs of history, the people who were 'lost' from a historical point of view.  (I keep thinking that Saracen should be made into a movie, now, with the rise in interest in the Islamic world--but of course Bob's Muslim characters weren't terrorists!  Well...they were...sort of....)  The Cathars were persecuted in what was really a land-grab by the French against the Spanish--in Languedoc today, you can still see, in bars, maps of France before and after the 'Albigensian crusade,' which make very clear that France exploded in size after grabbing that land.  Bob's last published book, Shaman, looked at the Black Hawk War from the Indian side.  That was his way--always to focus on the 'other' in any historical situation."

Here is a brief plot summary for All Things Are Lights: It takes place in the 13th century, mostly in France and in Egypt, with the characters also in Cyprus for a spell, and with brief discussion of offstage doings in other places. It begins in March 1244, with the final stages of the Albigensian Crusade, with the action in the last part of the book taking place during the Seventh Crusade ((1248–1254).

The hero is Roland de Vency, a native of Languedoc in southern France. He's both a troubadour devoted to the notions of courtly love and a knight. He is quite familiar with Islam -- he even has learned Arabic during a sojourn in Sicily -- and he doesn't believe any religion is any better than any other, an unpopular opinion in Catholic France. He gets involved in France's two  main crusades for personal reasons and not because he supports the aims of the wars. One of the main characters in the book is a member of the Knights Templar. He becomes Roland's best friend, and the reader learns a lot about the Templars, who are depicted sympathetically. Shea's book has a great villain, the Count de Gobignon, who uses his power to do terrible things, but who in his own mind is perfectly justified: He wants to rid France of heresy. He is thus a stand in for some of the main villains of history, such as Hitler and Stalin. 

I don't want to give away too much of the plot, but in my subjective opinion All Things Are Lights is particularly well plotted. The end of the book has great dramatic tension, with most of the main characters unsure whether  they will live or die. 

As in Shea's other books, there's plenty of action, the historic scenes are colorful and well-drawn, and there is a strong love/romantic element. The fact that Roland is a troubadour allows Shea to turn up the dial to 11 on the romantic parts of the plot.  In fact, the novel states explicitly that courtly love is tied to paganism, and two scenes involving the main romance in the novel are set near pagan sites, in Cyprus and Egypt. And in fact, Shea ties courtly love to sex magick, which in Cosmic Trigger I, Robert Anton Wilson depicts as possibly the main secret of the Illuminati, who have to avoid the attention of the Inquisition, depicted in All Things Are Lights as  a major force in medieval France. 

This isn't the only idea that ties All Things Are Lights to Illuminatus! The title itself comes from Illuminatus! where Simon Moon says, in a lecture to Joe Malik,

"An Irish Illuminatus of the ninth century, Scotus Ergina, put it very simply -- in five words of course -- when he said Omnia quia sunt, lumina sunt: 'All things that are, are lights.' "

While Shea never uses the "I" word, the Illuminati seem to be referenced pretty clearly in the text of All Things. At one point toward the end of  the book, Roland's Templar friend, Guido, shares some important hidden facts with Roland about a secret group within the Knights Templar: 

“Solomon’s temple harbors more secrets than you might guess,” said Guido. His voice was so soft that Roland had to strain to hear him. “I have permission to share some of that hidden knowledge with you. Roland, not all Knights Templar are merely what they purport to be. There exists within our order, another, secret order.”

The light filtering in through the narrow window was brighter now, and the prayer callers in the towers of Mansura’s mosques began their cries, reminding Roland that he was the prisoner of people who hated his kind, with good reason, and might at any moment decide to kill him.

Guido’s words made Roland want to draw back. He felt almost reluctant to hear more. He might, he suspected, learn things he would be better off not knowing.

“Guido, are you telling me that you are a heretic?”

In measured tones Guido said, “I am not a heretic. A heretic disagrees with the Church over this or that point of belief. I have left the Church far behind. I gave up everything when I joined the Templars - the little wealth I possessed, the love of women. I vowed to follow the orders of my superiors. I tell you in simple truth that I do not miss my past life. With my fellows, I have known, through the light imparted by my secret order, such bliss as no other Christians - except, I imagine, a few saints - have experienced on this earth.” He gripped Roland’s arm and stared into his eyes with a burning intensity. “Roland, I live in that state now, even as I talk to you.”

Roland looked deeper into his friend’s eyes and realized that what he was seeing was joy.

“You are a troubadour yourself, Guido,” Roland said. “You must know that those who practice courtly love attain the bliss you speak of. But we find it through the love of man and woman, not by giving up love.”

“Of course. But it is also possible to achieve the heights by constraining the appetite for physical love. There is one Light, but we need a window to see it, and in that window are panes of many different colors. Courtly lovers, Templars, Cathars, the masons’ guild, and many others have their representatives in our order. We have even forged secret links among Christians, Moslems, Jews, and men and women of other religions in far-off countries most people have never heard of.”

Roland was astounded. A secret organization of so many different kinds of people spread across the world, yet all sharing the same hidden knowledge of the inner light he had discovered as a troubadour - the vision made his head reel.

The book even has an indirect but clear reference to Discordianism. In Chapter 29, one of the main characters, Nicolette, who is married to the bad guy but the lover of Roland, goes off to an island to mourn after getting bad news. She finds herself in the ruins of an old pagan temple.

"She walked into the circle of columns and dropped to her knees on the marble floor. She looked for and found a carving that she and Roland had talked about the night they came here. It had fallen from the temple roof and showed a naked young man facing three naked women and holding out an apple to one of them. Roland had said the one receiving the apple was the Goddess of Love. She reached out and with her fingertips touched the smooth shoulder of the young man."

The apple is the golden apple of Eris, and the scene apparently depicts the Judgment of Paris, the mythological event that doomed Troy. Paris is completing the beauty contest by handing the apple to Aphrodite, thereby setting off events that will bring about the Trojan War, and creating two implacable enemies for Troy, beauty contest also-rans Hera and Athena.

In his "Historical Illuminatus" novels, Robert Anton Wilson has characters who apparently are ancestors of characters in Illuminatus! 

Shea is more subtle, but there's also a possible reference in one of the minor characters. We are told that Roland has a sister named Fiorela, and that she lives in Naples.  Roland mentions that she has married well, to "Lorenzo Celino, knight of the Holy Roman Empire. My mother writes that he is a thoroughly virtuous man, which is rare for one of the Emperor’s courtiers.”

Sigismundo Celine is a native of Naples, the main setting of The Earth Will Shake, 1982, Wilson's first novel in the series. All Things Are Lights appeared in 1986. "Celine" strikes me as an Anglization of "Celino." Roland also as a family resemblance to Hagbard Celine; both men are described as dark and with a prominent nose. 

If you enjoy All Things Are Lights, you will  want to know that Shea's two Saracen novels represent a sequel of sorts; one of the main characters, Simon de Gobignon, is Roland's son. The Saracen novels are set mostly in medieval Italy. In All Things Are Lights, the main Moslem general demand that King Louis promise a 20-year truce with the Moslem world as a condition of being freed, because the general needs time to deal with the Islamic world's main military menace, the Mongols; in Saracen, a flashback scene depicts the Battle of Ain Jalut, which as Shea says in an Historical Afterword in All Things Are Lights was one of the most important battles in world history. 

Robert Shea audio

A photo from the Association for Consciousness Exploration in Cleveland, Ohio. From left, Timothy Leary, Robert Shea, Patricia Monaghan, Jeff Rosenbaum, Gillie Smythe. (UPDATE: Apparently the correct spelling is "Gilli Smyth," please see the comments.]

If you want to listen to Robert Shea talk, two audio recordings are available for purchase from the website of the Association for Consciousness Exploration, the organization I referenced in yesterday's blog post when I mentioned  how Shea and Patricia Monaghan met. They both cost $4.99 and there are two recordings available: "A Meeting with Robert Shea," an interview with Shea, also featuring Robert Anton Wilson, and "Magic in the Central Empire," a look at "the universe of Chinese Paganism." 

Patricia Monaghan, a writer you should know

Patricia Monaghan

Robert Shea's widow, Patricia Monaghan (1946-2012), was herself a noteworthy writer and scholar. She wrote more than 20 books, including poetry and nonfiction works on topics such as meditation and Celtic folklore.  She taught at Maybe Logic University and also was a full professor at DePaul University. She was a founding member of the the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology. She and her husband, Dr. Michael McDermott, were the founders of The Black Earth Institute, "an organization dedicated to inspiring artists to serve the causes of inclusive spirituality, protecting and healing the earth and fighting for social justice." I can't really cover all of her achievements in a relatively brief blog post, so please see the Wikipedia biography.  It has a useful bibliography. 

Monaghan won the Pushcart Prize for "Physics and Grief," her excellent essay on coping with grief after Shea's death in 1994. Dr. McDermott kindly obtained a PDF for me that I am allowed to share with you. Please do  yourself and favor and read it if you haven't read it before. 

Here is a biographical tidbit I have just obtained. Robert Anton Wilson, in his essay about Shea in Cosmic Trigger 3, wrote that Shea and Monaghan met when they had speaking gigs at a pagan festival. He didn't actually gave the name of the group or the location, but I can finally confirm what I've long suspected: They met as guest speakers for the Association for Consciousness Exploration, in Cleveland, Ohio, the same place where I live. Here is Joe Rothenberg, ACE co-founder, in an email to me:

"They met at The Starwood Festival, an annual event started in 1981.  At that time the The Starwood Festival was presented by The Association for Consciousness Exploration, a partnership formed by Jeff Rosenbaum amd myself to help organize our friends and run the festival.  Jeff passed away in 2015 [actually in 2014] I continued the festival with the continued support of our friends. 

"About 3 years ago I organized the Rosencomet Project as a non profit to continue presenting the Starwood Festival. This will be our 43rd (Starwoodfestival.com).

"RAW, Robert Shea, and Patricia Monaghan were supporters of ACE and The Starwood Festival and attended many of our events."

Patricia Monaghan was known for being a mentor to younger writers and scholars, and she was really nice to me when I emailed her to ask her questions about Shea. 

Illuminatus! Who wrote what?

The Eye in the Pyramid came out in fall 1975 as a Dell original paperback. While at this point it is impossible to know in detail which parts of Illuminatus! were written by Robert Shea and which by Robert Anton Wilson, a fair amount is actually known about how the work was written. They took turns writing sections, with Shea producing much of the "melodrama" and Wilson much of the satire. Robert Shea's parts were rewritten by Wilson so that the work had a uniform tone. Shea wrote the Atlantis section. Wilson supplied the Lovecraft/Cthulhu Mythos material, the occult material, the references to James Joyce, the signs from the Midget, and, very likely, the Burroughs cut up technique.

Wilson and Shea were both very familiar with anarchism/libertarianism, both knew Discordianism well, both knew Chicago and New York well, both were ex-Catholics familiar with Catholic priests. 

The editors at Dell trying to get the work published found Shea easier to work with than than Wilson; for example, Wilson resisted dividing the work into three volumes. See this interview with Dell editor David Harris: "Wilson was not much interested in cooperating with any of my ideas until I put it to him that I was his only friend in the company, and that if I dumped him his manuscript would be put on a shelf to die. (Actually, I think I said that it would be tossed in the East River.) He finally agreed to the three-volume idea, and I got it into the schedule not long before I left Dell, which would have beHen October of 1974."

Here is more detail and some citations from interviews on how Illuminatus! was written.

Here is Wilson on who wrote what: "In general, the melodrama is Shea and the satire is me; but some of the satire is definitely him and some of the melodrama is certainly me. 'When Atlantis Ruled the Earth' is 99% Shea. The sections about Simon Moon, Robert Putney Drake and Markoff Chaney are 99% me. Everything else is impossible to untangle. The celebrated Blow Job on the beach, for instance, is almost all Shea ... "

When asked whether the Lovecraft/Cthulhu elements in Illuminatus! come from Shea or Wilson, Wilson responded, " It’s me.  I went through a period in the early 1960s when I kept having the Lovecraft horrors every time I took peyote."

As for Shea, he also says (in an interview for Outworlds), "The use made in Illuminatus! of Lovecraft’s material is largely Wilson’s contribution." 

I don't know of a Shea interview that goes into detail on who wrote what, but this comment, also from the Outworlds interview details the process of cutting that Illuminatus! went through: "The original manuscript was about 1,200 typewritten pages, and we were asked to cut about 200 pages, which we did, screaming in agony all the while. This didn’t do any mortal, structural damage to the novel. It did cost us some good writing and some funny bits. A lot of what was cut was occult information in the appendices. Also When Atlantis Ruled the Earth was originally a complete screenplay-within-a-novel. Now it’s down to a summary."

About the collaboration process and Wilson rewriting Shea's portions:

CCN: Well, I want to touch upon your thoughts about the Internet a little bit later, but one thing I want to talk about since we mentioned Shea is that just to get into the mechanics of a writer, how did you collaborate?

RAW: Well, different writers have had different techniques. What Shea and I agreed on is to write alternate sections, and then I, how shall I phrase it? I persuaded Shea to let me rewrite his sections in order to make the style more uniform. So there are many sections that are almost all Shea in content, but they’re still me in style if you know what I mean. Like, one of the longest sections that’s almost all Shea is the movie about Atlantis… …yet the style is me. I rewrote the thing to get it into the style of the rest of the book, and I added a few key things like the idea of the fur bristling as an expression of emotion and a few other things like that. I also come up with the clouded lenses and I was trying to figure out how people who didn’t have our concepts of sin or mental illness would describe somebody whose perceptions they couldn’t understand, so I came up with the metaphor of the clouded lenses.

The interview also is interesting because of Wilson's comments on the Bride of Illuminatus sequel, which apparently didn't get very far: "Well, anyway, we decided we could do it, and we got started and then Shea died of cancer which was…the major tragedy of the last couple of years of my life. He was my best friend I think.  So I’m finishing it on my own…."

Robert Shea's novels, a reader's guide

Robert Shea was largely known for co-authoring Illuminatus! but before his death he wrote a number of historical novels, with the first, Shike: Time of the Dragons published in 1981, and the last, Shaman, appearing in 1991. Others were in the works when he died in 1994. 

All of his novels have been released under a Creative Commons license by Mike Shea, Robert Shea's son, and there are various places on the Internet where you are free to download them as ebooks. My suggestion is to use Project Gutenberg if you want to read Shaman or the two Saracen novels, as they are probably a bit better copyedited than any other editions. Otherwise, you may try the Internet Archive or the Amazon Kindle marketplace or the copies posted at the official Robert Shea website.  

If you want to read an actual book, some of them have been reprinted as new books by Mike Shea, available from vendors such as Amazon, and there are used copies available. BookFinder.com is probably the best place on the Internet to find cheap used books. 

While All Things Are Lights is my personal favorite and the one perhaps that has the most themes in common with Illuminatus!, the novels are generally similar in quality and style. They are tightly plotted, with nonstop action and a hero that has James Bond qualities of competence in dealing with his enemies. There is usually a strong element of romance and a fair amount of sex. You get a colorful, detailed sense of what life was like at the time and place of the setting. Shea was not above altering the details of history a bit to advance his story, but the books generally are historically accurate.

Perhaps one way to choose which book to try would be to pick the one that covers a period of history that fascinates you. I'll link to the Wikipedia entries, but you might want to avoid them if  you want to avoid spoilers. 

The books: 

Shike, essentially two novels that tell one story. The two are Time of the Dragons and Last of the Zinja. The setting is medieval Japan and China at the time of Kublai Khan, which means that you also learn a lot about the Mongols. Wikipedia entry. 

All Things Are Lights. The action takes place during the reign of Louis IX, king of France, also known as St. Louis, (1214-1270). There's a lot in the book about courtly love and about the Templars. The setting is mostly medieval France. I'll lead a discussion of the book later this week. I can't find a separate entry for this work on Wikipedia. 

The Saracen. Like Shike, these are two novels that tell one story, with Land of the Infidel followed by The Holy War. The setting is medieval Italy at the time of St.  Thomas Aquinas, a little after the action in All Things Are Lights. While the main character is a Muslim warrior, one of the other main characters is the son of two of the main characters in All Things are Lights. Wikipedia entry. 

Shaman. This one has a Native American hero and is set in the time of the Black Hawk War, no Wikipedia entry. The action takes place in the Midwest, which in 1832 was an American frontier. 

Welcome to Robert Shea week!

While I launched this blog to promote the work of the great American writer Robert Anton Wilson, I have always had a soft spot for Robert Shea, particularly since I finally read his novel All Things Are Lights years ago. I have made an effort to use this blog to promote Shea as well as his Illuminatus! co-writer, and as I happen to believe the cliche that actions are more convincing than lip service, I am today beginning a whole week of posts specifically about Shea. 

The Wikipedia biography of Shea covers his life pretty well, and you  should also look at the official site maintained by Shea''s son, Mike Shea. I have links to "Robert Shea resources" at the right side of this page. I am hoping that at least some of this week's posts will help you learn a bit about him, but here are a few "fun facts" about Shea:

• The basic idea for Illuminatus!, i.e., writing a novel based on the various conspiracy theories that readers mentioned on the Playboy Forum, was suggested by Shea when the two friends, who both worked at Playboy magazine, were having drinks in a Chicago bar. The two remained close, by the way, throughout Shea's life. 

• Shea obtained a book contract for Illuminatus! by contacting his old friend, Bob Abel, a book editor at Dell books. 

• While he was not particularly interested in the occult, he was interested in mysticism and specifically was very interested in Zen Buddhist. For  years, he did Zen Buddhist meditation every day. 

• Like Wilson, Shea was interested in Discordianism.

• After his involuntary departure from Playboy after a mass layoff of employees, Shea began a successful career as a writer of historical novels. He was still working very hard at a novelist when he died at age 61 in 1994, from cancer.

• Shea's third wife, Patricia Monaghan, was a very good writer in her own right. She taught at Maybe Logic Academy and also was a professor at DePaul University. 

Robert Shea Week, May 21-27

 Robert Shea Week will be May 21 through 27. I ordinarily focus on Robert Anton Wilson, but I write periodic blog posts about the other Illuminatus! author, whom I also think deserves attention, and later this month I'll write a series of posts.

I mention this because one of those posts will be an invitation to discuss Shea's novel, All Things Are Lights (you might recognize the phrase from Illuminatus!) and I wanted to do one more reminder about that, for anyone who might want to have time to read it and join the discussion. 

I am currently reading Shike Book One: Time of the Dragons, Shea's first historical novel. 

Robert Shea on 'All Things Are Lights'

 I plan to do a "Robert Shea Week," probably in late May, and I've invited people who read this blog to read  his historical novel All Things Are Lights and discuss it with me when I post about the book that week. I plan to reread the book.

Here is Shea on the novel, from a 1985 interview by Neal Wilgus published in Science Fiction Review,  a big SF fanzine in those days.

SFR: Could you describe All Things Are Lights for us?

SHEA: The title comes from a medieval philosopher, Scotus Erigena, who said, “All that are, are lights.” The main characters have an outlook that is as mystical as that statement, only their mysticism is not of the orthodox variety. The main character is a troubadour who achieves illumination in an adulterous affair with a countess through the rites of courtly love, which I portray as a Westernized version of tantric yoga. The troubadour is also in love with a woman minister of the heretical Cathar sect. Nowadays they tell women they can’t be priests; in those days they burned them at the stake for trying. These people get caught up in the disastrous Seventh Crusade led by King Louis IX, known today as St. Louis. The crusaders are eventually defeated by the Egyptian Mamalukes. The survivors, including the King, are held as hostages by the Moslems and try to save their lives by paying an enormous ransom.

Blogger's note: Elsewhere  in the  interview, Shea remarks  that there are threads  connecting All Things Are Lights  with Illuminatus! Here is my blog post in which I discuss those connections, see also the comments from Michael Johnson and Eric Wagner. 

Wanted: Pieces by Robert Shea

Charles Henri Ford, on the cover of one of his books. 

A couple of days ago, I mentioned that I plan to do a "Robert Shea Week" at this blog, sometime in May. In connection with that, I am looking for interviews with Shea, letters by Shea and essays by Shea that haven't already been posted at this blog or the official Shea website maintained by his son, Mike Shea. Mike Shea and I both have tried to preserve Shea's work, but it would be useful to have some help. You can search this website and look at the "Robert Shea Resources" links at the right side of this page, and check to see what's posted at the Shea site.

I particularly wish I could find some leads on the correspondence between the two Illuminatus! authors. In Cosmic Trigger 3: My Life After Death, RAW wrote that he hoped someday their correspondence might be published. That would be great, except that neither man apparently took steps to preserve it. I am still hoping for a break, but their literary executors apparently have nothing to report. 

I don't read poetry as often as I read fiction or nonfiction, but I do read some, and I have a longtime interest in the American poet Charles Henri Ford,  mostly for his surrealist poems written in the 1930s and 1940s. (Most of the Ford work I like is collected in a book, Flag of Ecstasy.) Ford was pretty obscure — I would be surprised if anyone reading this blog recognized the name — but as his Wikipedia article explains, Ford apparently took his work and legacy seriously. His papers and materials about him are collected and cataloged at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, at the University of Texas, at Yale University and at the University of Delaware. There are no comparable collections of Wilson or Shea papers. 

Coming up: Robert Shea Week/All Things Are Lights

Robert Shea. (Photo from official website).

Back in 2020, I did a "Robert Shea Week" to highlight information about Robert Anton Wilson's writing partner for Illuminatus! I see Robert Shea as an interesting writer and interesting figure in his own right; I don't want him to be forgotten or overlooked. Hence my posts about him and the "Robert Shea Resources" links at the right side of the page.

I want to do another Robert Shea Week. I am still working on ideas for it, but I am looking at doing it in May.

And for one of the upcoming blog posts, I want to discuss All Things Are Lights, Shea's historical novel set during the Middle Ages. It is my favorite Shea novel (so far; I want to finish reading all of his work) and it was the favorite of writer Patricia Monaghan, who was married to Shea when he died back in 1994. Here is a post where I talk about it a bit in connection to Illuminatus!

So I want to re-read All Things Are Lights, and invite everyone else who follows the blog to read it, and I'll post about it as one of my posts for Robert Shea Week, and anybody who chose to read it, or who remembers it, can comment. This won't be an online reading group in the sense of spending weeks on it, bit by bit, but I will be inviting discussion in a single blog post, in the comments.

Mike Shea, Robert Shea's son, has released the text of the book under the Creative Commons license. As I understand it, if you want to option it for a movie, you still have to pay him, but if you just want to read it, you can find a free digital edition. The official Shea website, which Mike Shea maintains, has a link to the Kindle edition ($5, I bought a copy) but also to a free version in HTML. And if you just want to read it for free, there are various other places to get a copy, such as at the Internet Archive. If you download an Epub version, you can read it on your phone with various ereaders, and Amazon now supports Epub for its Kindles. If you prefer print, you should be able to hunt up a used copy somewhere. 

And if anyone has a suggestion on what else I can do for Robert Shea Week, please offer it. I have some of my own ideas, but any suggestions would be welcome. See the link above for what I posted the last time. 

Request to readers

 

Robert Shea and his son, Michael, who now maintains the bobshea.net website. 

One more note about Robert Shea material, and a request for readers.

I have lately been listening to recordings of Robert Shea;  two of them are available for purchase at the website of the Association for Consciousness Exploration website. 

This post ends "Robert Shea Week," but I will continue to post about Shea from  time to time. 

There are many people out there collecting and making available material about Shea's Illuminatus! collaborator, Robert Anton Wilson, and they are doing a great job, but there isn't that much Shea activity. Do you have zines by Robert Shea (other than "No Governor," which I have), articles by Shea, correspondence from Shea or other material of interest? I would like to see it. I can be reached at tom.jackson (at) gmail.com. 

Prop Anon on Robert Shea

Prop Anon aka Gabriel Kennedy is hard at work on a biography of Robert Anton Wilson, and he was interviewed in 2017 by R.U. Sirius. I have permission from R.U. Sirius to reprint this bit:  

R.U.S: Robert Shea — coauthor of Illuminatus Triology — sort of ended up being “the quiet one”. What can you tell us about Shea and he and Bob’s relationship?

PA:Wilson and Shea became fast friends at Playboy. They would hang out together at the bar on payday. They, and their wives, would all hang out, smoke weed, watch TV or listen to records and think of funny sketches that made each other laugh. They had a lot in common: Both raised Irish Catholic, both left the Church young, both seeking to become full time free-lance writers. They both really dug into the Anarchist perspective. After Illuminatus!, Shea went on to start an Anarchist newsletter called No Governor, which Wilson contributed to. Wilson had a talent for collaborating with like-minded artists and thinkers; his and Shea’s collaboration resulted in Illuminatus! and that was itself a further collaboration out of their involvement with The Discordian Society. The two continually spoke of writing their sequel, Bride of Illuminatus, which they barely started before Shea was diagnosed with cancer. Shea’s death left Bob deeply distraught. Michael Shea, described seeing Bob at his father’s funeral looking shook by the whole event. Bob’s eulogy, Chimes at Midnight, published in Cosmic Trigger vol. III, written shortly after Shea provides a glimpse into Bob’s thoughts about his dead friend.

I also emailed Prop and asked if there was anything about Shea he wanted to share. He wrote back, "What seemed cool about Shea was that during the late 60s into the early 70s he got heavy into Anarchism, alongside RAW.

"Not only did he create his own anarchist newsletter, No Governor, he also was a regular contributor to the SRAF newsletter."

You could do worse than to follow Mondo 2000 on Twitter, and I noticed the other day that the R.U. Sirius book Counterculture Through the Ages is only $5 for the Kindle edition. 

Good interviews with Robert Shea

Robert Shea

There aren't as many interviews with Robert Shea as there are with Robert Anton Wilson. But there are a few good ones. 

I recently discovered an interview with Robert Shea I had wanted to read for awhile was available on the Internet.

Neal Wilgus interviewed Shea for the fall 1985 issue of "Science Fiction Review," a once-famous SF fanzine published by Richard Geis, and I ran across the fact the issue is available for downloading at the Internet Archive. You can find it there if you search, but after I share the news with Mike Shea, he posted it on the BobShea.net website, he posted it, so here's the link to the PDF. 

It's a long and meaty interview, with discussion of many topics, here is a small bit:

SFR: What contemporary authors do you get the most out of reading?

SHEA: The list is continually undergoing revision as my taste changes and my reasons for reading change, but John Fowles, Romain Gary, Norman Mailer, Yukio Mishima, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Thomas Pynchon, J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert Penn Warren seem to have taken up permanent residence in my literary pantheon.

Another Neal Wilgus interview with Robert Shea is included in a collection of Shea's work provided as a PDF at BobShea.net.  The first article, "Why I Am a Right Wing Anarchist" by Robert Weston, identified as being by Shea, is actually likely written by RAW.  But the piece that comes next is another Neal Wilgus interview with Shea, this time published in Outworlds, another well-known fanzine at the time, in an issue dating back to 1976. 

I had wanted to know for years who the book editor was who bought Illuminatus! for Dell, and it was this interview that gave me my big break -- I learned that it was Shea's good friend Bob Abel. (See my article about Bob Abel, which tells you as much as I was able to learn about Abel.) It's also a pretty good-sized and useful interview. 

Patricia Monaghan on 'Physics and Grief'

Patricia Monaghan

I recently acquired a copy of Patricia Monaghan's Pushcart Prize-winning piece about dealing with her grief over the death of Robert Shea, "Physics and Grief." You should read it (available at the link). It's a remarkable piece of writing, and you'll learn about Shea, and also learn what a good writer Monaghan was. While it serves as a requiem for Shea, I'm sure it must help Monaghan's friends deal with their loss., too Monaghan died in 2012. I am determined to find time to read more of her work. 

Interestingly, Monaghan explains her opinion that Shea "had more integrity than any person I'd ever met. That integrity remained to the end. He met his death with his long-held beliefs intact. He was frightened, but he was very, very brave."

You can read about Monaghan on Wikipedia, and also visit her official website, maintained by her husband, Dr. Michael McDermott, in much the same fashion that Mike Shea maintains the Robert Shea website.

Supergee on Robert Shea

Timothy Leary, Robert Shea, Patricia Monaghan, Jeff Rosenbaum, Gillie Smythe at an Association for Consciousness Expansion gathering in Cleveland. 

[Supergee posted this comment when I began "Robert Shea Week," and with his permission, I am now reposting it as a blog entry. -- The Management.]

By Supergee (Arthur Hlavaty)

Special guest blogger

Bob Shea was a dear friend. This is what I wrote about him when he died:

Shea's historical fiction can be described as "traditional." Each novel told a story, with beginning, middle, and end, pretty much in that order, and pretty much without obliqueness, irony, ambiguity, metafictional self-reference, and other such postmodern qualities.

The books can likewise be described as traditional in morality. Though they do not reflect the punitive sexual code often indicated by that phrase, they unabashedly treat such traits as compassion, courage, and loyalty as Good Things.

There are those who condescend to this sort of novel. (That is particularly easy to do so if one has not written one.) In reply, one might, at the very least, point out that each apparently simple and straightforward story is also a skilled and complex weaving of many plot threads, told in graceful prose with style and wit, and peopled with richly detailed and fascinating characters.

As a person, Shea was much like his novels. First and foremost, he believed that people should be nice to each other, but behind this apparently simple approach was an intelligent awareness of the problems it entailed and a perceptive skepticism about the organizations and ideologies that purported to provide and institutionalize niceness.

I had the pleasure of knowing Bob Shea, first postally and then in person as well, for 15 years. When Bernadette Bosky and I had our nonlegal wedding ceremony, he officiated, with the style, humor, and warmth he brought to everything. He was a flawed human being like all of us, but his good qualities far outweighed any flaws. I will miss him.

Supergee writes a blog. As Arthur Hlavaty, he is a well-known science fiction fan who was nominated 12 times for the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer. Some of his fanzines are archived on the Internet. See also this archive. 

Eric Wagner on Shike and Robert Shea's other fiction

                                                                            Robert Shea

By Eric Wagner

Special guest blogger

I first read Robert Shea when I read Illuminatus! in 1982. Since I had already read Wilson’s Schroedinger’s Cat and then went on read all the Wilson I could find, I had a much better sense of Wilson’s literary personality than I did of Shea’s. In 1986 I saw volume 1 of Shea’s Shike in the fiction section of Books, Etc., in Tempe, Arizona, and I bought it, hoping the same Robert Shea had written it. I started reading it, and it seemed like a conventional historical novel, but early on it included an initiation and the number 23, so I decided it seemed like the same Shea. (Ah, those pre-internet days before we had Google for fact checking.) I loved the book. I had read that Shea considered himself an anarchist and that he practiced Zen meditation. I thought he did a great job presenting people with political power in the novel. I thought his anarchism had given him great insight into political power, and I loved the Zen material in the book (and the martial arts). I quickly bought and read book two as well, and my friend novelist Paul Chuey suggested perhaps Shea wrote even better than Wilson. We both entertained that idea for a while, basking in the experience of reading Shike. I returned to preferring Wilson’s writing, but I definitely appreciated Shea’s contributions to Illuminatus! even more.

I worked at Hunter’s Books in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1986, and I saw an announcement for a new Robert Shea book, All Things Are Lights. I got all excited, recognizing the reference to the Scotus Erigina quote in the title. I ordered it, and devoured it when it arrived. I enjoyed it a bit less than the Shike books, but perhaps I had hyped myself up too much. Once again I loved Shea’s insight into people in power. I also loved how Shea’s books painted a picture of a Eurasian conspiracy of adepts in the late Middle Ages, providing deep background for the conspiracies in Illuminatus! and in Wilson’s other books. If you haven’t read any of Shea’s solo books, I highly recommend you give them a try.

Eric Wagner is the author of An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson, now available in a new revised and expanded edition. 

Getting Robert Shea's books

Robert Shea's novels are well worth reading and I encourage everyone to explore them. 

If you prefer books on paper, you can order used copies of all of his titles, and Robert Shea's son Mike Shea also has made paper editions of some titles.

But if  you are fine with ebooks, good news: Mike Shea has released all of the titles under the Creative Commons license. There are reasonably priced titles in the Kindle format on Amazon, but you can also get good editions for free. Here is my guide for getting good, free Robert Shea ebooks.

For my favorite, All Things Are Lights, get it on the Internet Archive, where you can download two convenient formats: mobi (for Kindles) and EPUB, usable on all other tablets and phones. I downloaded the mobi file and sent it to my Kindle and it worked fine.

You can also use the Internet archive to get copies, in the same two formats, of the two Saracen books, The Saracen: Land of the Infidel and its sequel, Saracen: The Holy War. (Really, they are one work, published in two parts.) The Internet Archive also has Shea's Native American historical novel, Shaman.

Project Gutenberg also has some Robert Shea titles at one convenient location, including Shaman and the two Saracen books. 

Shike, available as an inexpensive Kindle ($2.99 for both volumes) also is available for free in HTML at bobshea.net. $3 is cheap enough that I just bought it, to have it for my Kindle. There were problems for awhile with the text of the Kindle edition, but Mike Shea tells me those problems have been fixed. 

My next two posts for Robert Shea Week will be guest bloggers who will explain why you should read Shea. 

 

Trapped by his books! Mike Shea on Robert Shea

I've always been interested in Robert Shea as well as Robert Anton Wilson, and early in the  history of this blog, I interviewed Mike Shea, who is Robert Shea's literary executor and maintains the official BobShea.net website. (See the bottom of this page.)

I decided to seek a new interview for Robert Shea Week, and Mike obliged. I've been in touch with him periodically over the years for information or to raise a point, and he's always immediately replied. 

I asked Mike for a biography and he obliged: "Michael Erik Shea is a writer, gamer, and programmer living in Vienna, Virginia with his wife Michelle. Mike is the son of Yvonne Shea and Robert Joseph Shea, author of Illuminatus! and other novels.

"Mike is a huge Dungeons & Dragons nerd. He runs Sly Flourish, a website and Twitter feed dedicated to building better D&D Dungeon Masters. Mike wrote and self-published a number of RPG and D&D related books including Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, Fantastic Adventures, and Ruins of the Grendleroot. He also wrote freelance articles for Wizards of the Coast, Kobold Press, Pelgrane Press, Sasquach Games, and other RPG companies."

-- Tom 

Mike Shea

As far as you can tell, from sales, contact with fans, etc., what is your father's most popular book? I know it's probably hard to track downloads.

MIKE SHEA: Illuminatus! is still, by far, the most popular of his books followed by Shike. The sales on the books are roughly proportional to the way they were when they were published. One of the harsh realities of being an author is that your first book may be your most popular and you never quite get back to that level. I don’t remember my father talking about that very much but I imagine it’s something he thought about and it’s a hard thing to deal with. I see it with a lot of authors as well. Many people have said that Shaman, his last published book, was his best.

Has there been any interest in Hollywood adapting any of his books? Does the Creative Commons license you use mean they would have to pay you to turn Shike into a miniseries?

MIKE SHEA: The only interest has been for Illuminatus! Every few years a company would option the book for a movie, TV show, VR game, or something like that. It’s a nice unexpected bit of cash once in a while but isn’t job-quitting money. Once optioned, however, things usually fall apart. Recently however a company picked up the rights for Illuminatus! for an Amazon series. The big digital players are buying up properties like crazy and they seem to have deep pockets for experimentation. You can read more about it here.

Unfortunately, none of my father’s other books have been optioned.

Did your father ever give you advice on writing?

MIKE SHEA: Not really. I wasn’t doing a lot of writing when he was alive. It wasn’t until after he died that I got into it. A shame. Reading through his journals and interviews elsewhere helps me get an idea for the style of writing he would have recommended. Of course, I’d give anything to have had him read something I’m writing now. I think he’d love it. One of the things I always admire, and something that helps guide my own direction now, is that he never let go of being a kid. He loved Buck Rogers comic strips from the day he was like 5 years old to the day he died. He found a guy who was reprinting Buck Rogers in color and would mail the guy begging for more of them. He was never afraid of hanging onto childhood fantasies. He would doodle rocket ships on everything.

Do  you know if he particularly liked any of the cover art for his books?

MIKE SHEA: There were some he sure didn’t like. The ones that had Jebu from Shike with black hair pissed him off when the fact that he had red hair was a big part of the story. I think he always dug the original Illuminatus! covers, as do I. They’re classics.

I recently re-read Patricia Monaghan's essay "Physics and Grief," did you know Monaghan very well and what was she like?

MIKE SHEA: I can’t say very well but we spoke often before and after my father’s death. She was really smart, of course, and funny and warm and caring. She took care of my dad at the worst parts of his life and I am always eternally grateful for that. I wasn’t ready to do that at 20 years old. I liked her a great deal and was really happy she was in my father’s life.

How did your father and Robert Anton Wilson stay in touch over the years, was it mostly letters, and are there any new clues on what happened to that correspondence?

MIKE SHEA: I think it was occasional phone calls but probably mostly letters. I don’t have any of the correspondence in my own archives. I don’t know if Christina Pearson, Wilson’s daughter, has any. She’s never mentioned them to me. [I've asked on the RAW side and had  no luck. So far, no one seems to know anything. -- Tom]

Do you want to tell Robert Shea fans something about him they might not know? Is there anything your father told you that sticks with you that you'd like to share?

MIKE SHEA: He was a pretty normal guy. For the guy who edited at Playboy and wrote Illuminatus! and marched in the 60s and all of that, he was a pretty straight forward dude. He took his walks every day. He took naps. He was always soft spoken and relaxed. Our family certainly had some hardships but he always kept on going. He had an awesome office full of his tchotchkes and tacky souvenirs that he loved. Even though he stopped smoking in the early 80s his office always smelled like a tobacco shop, which was nice.

Boy did he collect books. He had these huge old green shelves in the back of his office. He filled it up with books, then crammed more books above the ones lined up on the shelves, then another row in front of the first, then more crammed in above that. Pretty much as many books as you could pack in. One day I came home from school and he was yelling at me for help. The book case had collapsed in front of the door of his office, trapping him inside. He was slowly working his way through the bookcase, piling up these monoliths of books across the office floor. He might have starved back there but at least he had something to read!

Welcome to Robert Shea Week

Robert Shea, wearing a T-shirt proclaiming him as "Super Writer," poses with the manuscript of Shike. Photo taken circa 1981, from BobShea.net. 

I've long said that as great as Robert Anton Wilson was, his Illuminatus! co-author, Robert  J. Shea, also should be remembered, and still should be read. The "Robert Shea Week" I announced plans for a few weeks ago begins today, with about a week's worth of posts about Shea. 

Shea, of course, besides coming up with the idea for Illuminatus!, getting Dell to buy it and and co-writing it with Robert Anton Wilson, also authored quite a few books on his own, mostly well-received historical novels such as Shike and Shaman and All Things Are Lights. He was working on two more novels when cancer claimed  him on March 10, 1994. He was only 61.

Many of my previous postings concerning Shea's work are available under "Robert Shea Resources" and "Illuminatus Resources" on the right side of his page, and I'll also put up links for Robert Shea Week. You can also visit the official page maintained by his son Mike Shea, read the substantial and useful Wikipedia entry.  and read the entry about Shea, by critic John Clute, at the Science Fiction Encyclopedia. 

"Robert Shea Week" should not be taken too literally, but is a flexible event, as "Robert Anton Wilson Week" was at Boing Boing years ago. I am expecting the publication soon of the new Starseed Signals "lost" RAW book and Prop Anon has been hoping to make an announcement about his Robert Anton Wilson biography, and who knows what other news might emerge. If there is "breaking news," you will get it here without delay, and then Robert Shea Week will resume. 

Thanks to everyone who has helped me put my Robert Shea Week posts together. I got one response when I offered to publish guest posts, and that will be up soon,  and I also got help from others for requests for favors or information; it's not too late to send me something or just to post a comment on one of the blog articles.