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Comment by KineticLensman | Hacker News Reader

I read Foucault's Pendulum and finished it, but it was heavy going. I then read "The Illuminatus! Trilogy" [0] which I enjoyed much more, because it was more intentionally cranky and funny. It is to conspiracy novels as "Airplane!" was to disaster movies, and then some.

[Edit] Both of them make Dan Brown look really, really unimpressive. If "The Da Vinci Code" is a vaguely thought-through concept aimed at general readers, "The Illuminatus! Trilogy" is an explosion in a conspiracy theory factory.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy

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> Both of them make Dan Brown look really, really unimpressive. If "The Da Vinci Code" is a vaguely thought-through concept aimed at general readers, "The Illuminatus! Trilogy" is an explosion in a conspiracy theory factory.

It's mostly because Browns work is just a cheap simulacrum of the original conspiracy theorists who came up with the story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holy_Blood_and_the_Holy_Gr...

Everything you say is true, but the Illuminatus! Trilogy also presents some serious philosophy sandwiched between the raunchiness and silliness. For example the SNAFU principle is a reasonable explanation for a lot of what we see in large organizations. Also, expanding Hegelian dialectic by adding Parenthesis and Synthesis to fit the Law of Fives is tongue in cheek, but in a haha only serious kind of way.

Indeed. I also like how it demands attention from the reader, for example by sometimes changing the character PoV on a sentence-by-sentence basis, between characters who are sometimes themselves unreliable narrators.

Illuminatus! is deliberately a send-up of the kind of stuff that Dan Brown writes, though. He's sincerely trying to make thrillers; Wilson and Shea were (partly) making fun of authors like him.

> Illuminatus! is deliberately a send-up of the kind of stuff that Dan Brown writes

To be clear (for the benefit of others), not specifically of Dan Brown. DB was only aged 11 when Illuminatus! was first published in 1975.

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