The Devil's Masquerade

Back in 2013, I published a blog post which discussed Arthur Hlavaty's speculation that Masks of the Illuminati originally was titled The Devil's Masquerade. 

You can read the whole blog post, but here's a bit of it:

Arthur wrote, "One thing I noticed again is that the original title was probably The Devil's Masquerade, which I like. Presumably changed for commercial reasons." I asked Arthur if he could offer a citation, and he said, "That's a guess. There's the poem where each quatrain ends with the phrase, and it's an obvious theme in the discussion on the train."

I sometimes get interesting comments posted to old blog posts, and the other day, Photovore posted this comment: "Masks was originally titled The Devil’s Masquerade yes. Bob says so in an interview 'the man with the cosmic triggerfinger' (interview can be found at rawilsonfans.org)."

Here is the relevant bit from the interview (with Neal Wilgus in "Science Fiction Review," 1980:

SFR: I understand you’ll have a science fiction trilogy coming out soon and are working on an occult novel called THE DEVIL’ S MASQUERADE.

WILSON: The occult thriller will be published first and is now called MASKS OF THE ILLUMINATI. It’s set in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1914 and the principle characters are Albert Einstein, James Joyce and Aleister Crowley. It should be in the bookstores early next summer. The sci-fi trilogy is called SCHRODINGER’S CAT and is a kind of quantum comedy, based on the most literal possible reading of the Everett-Wheeler-Graham multi-universe interpretation of the Schrodinger equations. That is, it’s the parallel worlds theme that’s been done and redone and al­most done to death in sci-fi, but I really think I have an unusually com­ical slant on it. That’ll be out in winter’ 79- 80, in some universe or other. The action or actions of SCHRODINGER’S CAT are set in various possible realities that might emerge by 1984 and, if the Eveiett-Wheeler­Graham theory is true, the publica­tion of the trilogy should cause the readers’ subsequent experience of 1984 to be more like my Hedonic pro­jections than like the masochistic projections of the doomsters. That is, the writing and publication of the trilogy is a magical and scien­tific experiment — an attempt to demonstrate the creation of an altern­ative reality. It’s very much like the old Marx Brothers routine: “There’s $1000 in the house next door”. “But there is no house next door”. “Then let’s build one”. I’m going beyond guerilla ontology to guerilla Futurism.