Shea met Wilson in the late 1960s when they worked on Playboy magazine. They decided to collaborate on a novel. It would combine sex, drugs, religious cults and conspiracies, as well as anarchy. Their philosophical and political differences merely served to enrich their efforts. Objectivity was jettisoned, as indeed was subjectivity: no single point of view or version of reality was privileged: Illuminatus! was the three-volume consequence. Illuminati, a card game from Steve Jackson Games, was inspired by the books. A trading card game,, and a role-playing game, GURPS Illuminati, followed. Shea provided in 1983 a brief introduction for the Illuminati Expansion Setrule book. "Maybe," he wrote, "the Illuminati are behind this game. They must be. They are, by definition, behind everything." He and Wilson remained good friends in later years.
Other works
Shea went on to write historical action novels, including Shike, a two-volume novel set in Ancient Japan about the warrior monk Jebu and his love Lady Shima Taniko, All Things Are Lights, and The Saracen, a novel published in two volumes in 1989 depicting the struggle between a blond Muslim warrior called Daoud ibn Abdullah and his French crusader adversary Simon de Gobignon. His last published book was the Native American tale Shaman. These stories were straightforward beginning-middle-end tales, but included a few sly hints about the subjects of Illuminatus! All Things Are Lights and the outline for the unfinished novelChildren of Earthmaker have been released under a Creative Commons license and are available to read and copy at Robert Shea's website. Lady Yang was finished but never published; a Creative Commons online version is in the works by Shea's son Michael. Three of his lectures and two panel discussions he participated in were recorded when he was a featured speaker at both the Starwood Festival and the WinterStar Symposium and produced by the Association for Consciousness Exploration. For several years, Shea edited the anarchist zineNo Governor. The title comes from a quote attributed to Zhuangzi, "There is no governor anywhere." The zine was mentioned in and read by one of the characters in Illuminatus!. Clipped from the Robert J. Shea Tribute page: Shea was a resident of Glencoe, Illinois He was survived by his son, Michael E. Shea, and his second wife, author Patricia Monaghan.
