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  • Jude: Level 1
    Jude: Level 1
    by Julian Gough

    My new novel. It starts with the award-winning, BBC broadcast prologue, "The Orphan and the Mob", and continues with Jude's quest for True Love in Tipperary, Galway, the Aran Islands, and Dublin... Love, death, arson, philosophy, and sex. Starring Jude, an orphan who looks the spit of Leonardo DiCaprio. Except for having two penises. Which makes True Love... complicated.

  • Juno and Juliet
    Juno and Juliet
    by Julian Gough

    My first novel, of which I am very fond. The adventures of teenage twin sisters Juno & Juliet, in their first year away from home. Life, love and literature, in Galway and Tipperary.

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« Robert Anton Wilson reduced to an essence | Main | Testing, testing... »
Saturday
20Jan

Robert Anton Wilson is dead

When I finally finished writing Jude, after seven years of work, one of the first people I wanted to send it to was Robert Anton Wilson, because he had helped create the mind that wrote it. When I was a teenager, the three novels he co-authored with Robert Shea (The Illuminatus Trilogy) had changed my idea of what the novel was capable of. Later, his non-fiction books, especially Cosmic Trigger: Book 1, and Prometheus Rising, had changed my idea of what I was capable of.

I was about to send him a typescript of Jude when my friend and agent, Charlie Campbell, discovered that Wilson was terminally ill. I decided not to send it. A man busy dying does not need five hundred loose leaves of someone else's book sliding off his knees and across the room.

But I wish now I'd sent him a short note instead. I wish I’d said hello. And thank you. And goodbye.

He died on January 11th 2007.

It doesn't make sense to mourn him: his life was long, and filled with achievement on every level. His books changed lives (often for the better). He had a tremendous marriage, to Arlen (who died, I think, in 1999.) He seemed to get on great with his three surviving children. (The fourth, his wonderful daughter Luna, was murdered in the 1970s). He had a heck of a lot of friends. He was loved.

I’ll write more, on another day, about Robert Anton Wilson, and his work. There’s much, much more to be said. For today, all I want to say is something like…

Hello Robert. Thank you. Goodbye.


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