The COSMIC TRIGGER trilogy deals with a process of deliberately induced brain change that is called ‘initiation’ or ‘vision quest’ in many traditional societies and is hazardous variety of self-psychotherapy offered as psychedelic satire. It is in many ways the best sort of occult self-parody that take large doses of the forbidden and mixes liberally with popular science and history, adding just a dash of paranoia to produce a fantasy that many may feel offers a close look at the underpinnings of the reality we pretend is different. The main thing we learn is that ‘reality’ is always plural and mutable.

In these works Wilson manages to reverse most of what we take as normal and dishes it up afresh as something delightfully novel. In many ways this trilogy is a vision of cyberpunk and a meditation upon the human condition remarkably refreshing and mutative as well as drug crazed and frenetic.

In the long-awaited third volume of the COSMIC TRIGGER trilogy includes Wilson’s witty and humorous observations about the widely spread (and, happily, premature) announcement of his demise. And, of course, what Wilson masterpiece would be complete without synchronicities, religious fanatics, UFOs, crop circles, paranoia, pompous scientists, secret societies, high tech, black magic, quantum physics, hoaxes (real and fake), Orson Welles, James Joyce, Carl Sagan, Madonna and The Vagina of Nuit. In many ways the third volume offers some of the most delightful outlandish analogies of the series.