Hilaritas Press, the publishing imprint of the Robert Anton Wilson Trust, has just released a new edition of The New Inquisition.
The book features a new introduction by Douglas Rushkoff.
Other news from Hilaritas: An audiobook of Cosmic Trigger II will be out soon!
Read the whole thing news release.
More information on the new edition.
10 comments:
To me this is RAW’s worst book: hectoring, clanking with pig irony, unselective in its examples, giving aid & comfort to those who say that when Dr. Fauci discusses viruses, that’s just his eddication talking. But it finishes with a marvelous discussion of how we perceive.
@Supergee, To be honest, I've been avoiding the book because I've been afraid it's RAW's worst book. With close to 100,000 dead, it't not my perception that scientists have an iron grip on this country that needs to be loosened. But with the new edition, I'm going to buy it and read it and then make up my own mind.
I love this book. Bob loved science, but he wanted to apply the scientific method to science itself.
Well, I've just bought it, so I'll try to read it soon.
Once again Hilaritas press have managed to collapse the price of an old RAW title down to 12 pounds. Some people were coughing up 30+ quid for old dog eared copies of these in the UK. Thank you once again to the dedicated team.
I think Mr Wilson had a bee in his bonnet about the worst excesses of scientific materialism rather than science itself. So it seems like he gets a bit carried away in this volume? I'm intrigued by the comments here...and I'm looking forward to reading it. Iain S.
Iain Sinclair?
I don't think it is his worst book. Among the nonfiction, both Coincidance and Email to the Universe are worse, a mishmash of b-grade and c-grade stuff. (And Moore's intro to the former is dreadful in my view -- and it is clear he never read Korzybski, or if he did, he didn't understand what he was reading. That's the only way I can explain the line "Count Alfred Korzybski’s work implies that almost all human experience is linguistic in its nature..." Whaa? Anyway...)
Among his nonfiction, the Cosmic Trigger books, Prometheus Rising and Quantum Psychology are his best, I'd say. I would rank this book after those, but above the Coincidance and Email... I think the first chapter is terrific -- it's RAW in all his agnostic glory. The book gets tedious though as it goes on... and RAW piles up example after example (often not persuasive) a la some kind of modern Charles Fort... but I find I skim over those and still find little RAW gems throughout... The tone it's also a bit shrill for him, which may contribute to the negative vibe around the book.
I think the book ends well, the chapter Creative Agnosticism is strong.
I have the New Falcon edition... and I have just bought the Hilaritas edition. I will reread it and see if I think differently on a second reading.
But yeah, I agree with Tom re: this isn't what the country needs at the moment! If anything, we've swung the other way.
Eric Wagner, that should read, Iain Spence. My apologies for lazy typing.
My own life has been saved twice by medical science so I have a lot of respect for science in general. I like reading both Rupert Sheldrake and RAW's views on the subject.
Looking forward to Tom Jackson's impressions here on the blog, Iain
@Inigo- I love Coincidance- The Finnegans Wake material is worth the entire book. I do agree that "email to the universe" is a bit of a patch up job and would have rather RAW have completed "Tale of the Tribe."
I am incredibly prejudiced to favor Alan Moore and enjoyed the introduction. However Moore definitely has his own intellectual biases and agendas- however RAW's interpretations of information could be heavily influenced by his own expectations. For all our agnosticism we all still have definite biases.
I'll write about this soon, but I really liked "Coincidance" and "Email to the Universe." I thought the latter was a fine collection of many of RAW's best pieces, and I've read it several times.
I'm working on "The New Inquisition" and will share some impressions soon.
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