Porno for Paranoids

Back before millions of images of every conceivable sex act could be accessed for free online, it was common for writers, especially genre writers, to pay the bills by writing a little porn on the side. Usually they would use pseudonyms, but occasionally someone would plaster his own name on the stroke book's cover, as Robert Anton Wilson did with The Sex Magicians, the first novel he published and, until now, a nearly impossible book to find. Since Wilson, who died earlier this year, had a large libertarian following, I'll mention here that his "adult" effort is now online in pdf form.

I should also mention that he once said the book was something he'd "rather forget." I'm enough of a fan that I've been reading it, and it's clear that it was written in a rush for some fast money and/or was edited with a sloppy hand. But despite its literary shortcomings it's an interesting curio: He throws in plenty of satire, political ruminations, and Illuminati references, including some characters and events that would later reappear in Illuminatus and Schrödinger's Cat. It's just that they're mixed up with a lot of hard-core sex, way more than you'll find in his later books, including what must be the only sex scene ever written that features a midget in a Teddy Snowcrop costume. Actually, there's a lot of surrealist sex here; at times the text feels more like Alfred Jarry than Gerard Damiano. I have to wonder what the book's original audience—dirty old men? curious teenagers? vice cops?—made of it.

If you're not a Wilson fan, for God's sake don't start here. But if you are a fan, you might find this interesting, even entertaining.

Update: Two readers remind me that a version of the Teddy Snowcrop scene appears in Schrödinger's Cat as well. But I'm pretty sure Wilson never recycled the chapter that cross-cuts a young man deflowering his fiancée with a series of TV commercials.

Update #2: Egg on my face: Another reader tells me Wilson revived the deflowering sequence for Schrödinger's Cat as well. It isn't in the one-volume edition I'm familiar with—the only edition that's currently available—but it is (apparently) in the original, uncut, three-volume version. Someone should put a pdf of that online. Or better yet, bring it back into print.