NAH had already put out bumper stickers saying things like:
REGISTER CAPITALISTS, NOT GUNS
and:
HONK IF YOU'RE ARMED
and:
EAT THE RICH
And they even had a rubber stamp which they used to decorate subway advertisements with the Nihilistic message: ARM THE UNEMPLOYED: RIOT IN THE LOOP ON NEW YEAR'S EVE.
But they really outdid themselves with the build-your-own atomic weapon sheet, which was titled "Hobbysheet #4" and looked like this:
HOBBYSHEET #4 in a series of 30. Collect 'em all!
A SIMPLE ATOMIC BOMB FOR
THE HOME CRAFTSMAN
There is nothing complex about an Atomic (or Fission) Bomb. If enough fission material (Uranium 235 or Plutonium 237) is brought together to form a critical mass, it will explode. The trick is to put the pieces together fast enough to get a decent blast before the bomb blows itself apart. This can be done quite simply by means of ordinary explosive as shown below.
It was later estimated that the Nihilist Anarchist Horde, most of whom were living on Welfare, were able to mail out only 200,000 of these over the four-year period (1976-80) before they grew bored with the project.
Nonetheless, many of the equally paranoid and hostile persons who received this mailing had access to Xerox machines and were as desperate as the members of NAH itself. It was later determined that by 1981 there were over 10,000,000 copies of "Hobbysheet #4" in circulation. Eventually one of them reached the POE group, who were ready for an idea like that.
The planet as a whole continued to drowse.
ALTERNATIVE TEXTS
That is precisely what common sense is for, to be jarred into uncommon sense.
–eric temple bell, Mathematics: Queen of the Sciences
GALACTIC ARCHIVES:
The original title of the greater part of what we have collected in this book under the title Schrodinger's Cat was The Universe Next Door. The book of that name was begun as a sequel to llluminatus!, but after several editors in a row suffered psychotic breakdowns while reading it, publishers defensively ordered that any ms. with that title, from Robert Anton Wilson, should be returned unopened.
"People generally do not want a new form of prose fiction to replace the hackneyed 'novel,' " Wilson wrote in a letter to his friend Malaclypse the Younger. "There never has been a serious attempt since Odysseus."
Schrodinger's Cat Fair Copy #2, according to Wilson scholars, incorporates later and still more bizarre material, the text of which was allegedly dictated to Wilson by a canine intelligence-"vast, cool, and unsympathetic"- from the system of the Dog Star, Sirius. Schrodinger's Cat Fair Copy #3 appeared much later, in 2031, under mysterious circumstances. Some claimed, at the time, that it had been received by a trance medium to whom Wilson had "broadcast" it after his melodramatic departure from this world in 1993. Skeptics have always insisted that the alleged medium actually found it in an old tampon box in her attic. A legend about the manuscript being recovered from the Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco, after the earthquake of 2005, and passed around among adepts of certain occult groups, is probably mythical.
Various alternative texts, generally considered forgeries, have circulated at intervals and many Wilson scholars debate heatedly whether this final ms. is, in fact, totally or even in major part Wilson's work. That two authors at least are here represented, often at cross-purposes with each other, is the emerging academic consensus at this time.
The present edition incorporates all material that is undoubtedly Wilson's, together with matter of such a Wilsonian and weird character that the present editor regards it as probably-Wilson's-within-reasonable-doubt.
It only remains to affirm that Schrodinger's Cat, contrary to appearances, is not a mere "routine" or "shaggy shoggoth story." Despite his sinister reputation and his well-known eccentricities, Wilson was one of the last of the scientific shamans of the primitive, terrestrial phase of the cruel, magnificent Unistat Empire. This may be hard to understand when many Establishment scholars still deny that anything like scientific shamanism existed in the twentieth century, but it is nevertheless well documented that Wilson, Leary, Lilly, Crowley, Castaneda, and many others pursued rigorous studies in scientific shamanic research even under the persecution of the "neurological police" so characteristic of that barbaric epoch.* Some have even proposed that Schrodinger's Cat is actually a manual of shamanism in the form of a novel, but that opinion is, almost certainly, exaggerated.
*See the Editor's "Clandestine Neurotransmitter Research Under the Holy Inquisition and the D.E.A.," Archives of General Archaeology, Vol. 23, No. 17.
ONE MONTH TO GO
Immature humorists borrow; mature humorists steal.
–mark twain
On December 1, 1983, Benny "Eggs" Benedict, a popular columnist for the New York* News-Times-Post, sat down to compose his daily essay. According to his usual procedure, he breathed deeply, relaxed every muscle, and gradually forced all verbalization in his brain to stop. When he had reached the void, he waited to see what would float up to fill the vacuum. What surfaced was:
One month to go to 1984.
Benny looked at the calendar; what happened next would be portrayed by a cartoonist as a light bulb flashing on over his head. He began pounding the typewriter, comparing the actual situation of the world with Orwell's fantasy.
*Galactic Archives: New York was an independent city-state in the northwest of Unistat. It was noted for its malodorous stockyards, its vast motion-picture industry, and a huge phallic monument dedicated to "Washington," a fertility god who allegedly slept in nearly every part of the Unistat, usually with human women, bringing forth such semidivine progeny as the gigantic Paul Bunyan, the patriotic General Motors, the trickster-god Nixon, and the benign Mickey Mouse, who began as a totem of the city of Disneyland and eventually became the principal divinity of all Unistat.
His column, headed "One Month to Go," was read by nearly 10,000,000 people, the News-Times-Post being the only surviving daily paper available to the 20,000,000 citizens of the six boroughs of New York City. Nine million of the 10,000,000 readers were a little bit paranoid, this being the natural ecological result of crowding that many primates into such a congested space, and most of them agreed with the most pessimistic portions of Benedict's estimation of Orwell's accuracy as a prophet.
"One month to go to 1984" became a catchphrase to conclude or answer anybody's complaint about anything. "One month to go to 1984"-soon you heard it everywhere; it reached Chicago by December 10, San Francisco by December 14, was even quoted in Bad Ass, Texas, on December 16.
By December 23 the London Economist printed a very scholarly article on world history from 1949, when Orwell's book was published, to the present, enumerating dozens of parallels between Orwell's fiction and the planet's nightmare.