Colin Wilson World

One of Colin's grandchildren, Ralph Wilson, son of Roderick Wilson, Colin's son from his first marriage, has written a short piece about his grandfather. See the Views page.

NEWS UPDATE SEPTEMBER 2006

A two-part interview with Colin Wilson is now available for listeners at Astraea, the online magazine and web radio channel for science, history and philosophy. Presenter Guy Leigh discusses with Colin his autobiography Dreaming to some Purpose, including his being catapulted to fame, his associations with leading intellectuals of the day, and his lifelong interest in questions of consciousness and the paranormal. The interview can be accessed by clicking on Radio on the home page at www.astraeamagazine.com

NEWS UPDATE, JULY 2006

The long-awaited second edition of Colin Stanley's The Work of Colin Wilson: an annotated bibliography and guide is to be published in August, 2006. At 500 pages, it includes: details of all 169 books published by Colin Wilson; 546 of his published articles; 317 book reviews; more than 300 books and articles about his work; 1,500 reviews of his books; lists of his television and radio appearances; and a comprehensive index and chronology. ISBN 0-946650-89-6, ISSN 0959-180X.

Published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of The Outsider, there will be a numbered edition of the bibliography of just 100 copies. To reserve your copy, send a cheque for £19.95, including postage and packing in the UK, payable to Colin Stanley, to Paupers Press, 37 Quayside Close, Trent Bridge, Nottingham NG2 3BP, UK.Post-publication price £24

NEWS UPDATE MAY 2006

A new two-part interview with Colin to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Outsider can now be found in the Interviews section, entitled 50 years of The Outsider, and Living to be 300.

  A new paperback edition of Colin's Mysteries (1978) is now available from publishers Watkins, of London, as a companion title to their edition of The Occult (1971) which they published in 2004.

Colin is to give what might be described as an anniversary talk at the University of Wales, Lampeter, on May 24, 2006, only a few days before the 50th anniversary of publication of The Outsider on May 28. His subject will be "Outsiders and Rebels" and the event is described as a "philosophy colloquium" talk and discussion. It is to be held in Room 068 in the arts building. Further information from Tristan Nash by e-mail at px121@lamp.ac.uk

  A new book, Colin Wilson: Philosopher of Optimism, by Canadian journalist Brad Spurgeon, is published on May 25, 2006, by Michael Butterworth at 9.99, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Outsider. It is described as a lively, compelling and concise account at the battlefront of the fight against the pessimistic world-view, and a book for anyone who wants to see how they can make a difference simply by the way they perceive the world. The book contains an introduction by Spurgeon, an expanded version of an article of his about Colin which appeared in the International Herald Tribune and the New York Times in August, 2005, and a two-part interview which Spurgeon conducted with Colin at his home in Cornwall in 2005. It also includes three essays by Colin published in 2006: Article for the Big Idea, from Adbusters, the Introduction to Paul Hougham's Gaia Atlas of Mind, Body and Spirit, and Phenomenology as a Mystical Discipline, from Philosophy Now.

  To order the book, e-mail michael-butterworth@ntlworld.com, or telephone +44 (0) 0161 225 7427. ISBN: 0-9552672-0-X/978-0-9552672-0-8. Michael Butterworth has also published the 2004 e-book, The Odyssey of a Dogged Optimist (A Defence of Colin Wilson), by Robert Meadley, which is available as a free download at http://www.savoy.abel.co.uk/HTML/odyssey.html. This funny, clever and erudite defence of Colin followed a number of vitriolic national newspaper reviews of his 2004 autobiography, Dreaming to Some Purpose. Meadley disposes of each of the critics in turn while at the same time examining the qualities that make Colin's work so insightful and compelling.

NEWS UPDATE APRIL 2006

A new edition of Colin's A Criminal History of Mankind, which appeared originally in 1984, is published in the UK by Mercury Books on May 15, 2006 (ISBN 1 84560 002 9), priced at 25. It is a fully revised and updated edition which incorporates two new and disturbing developments in crime which have taken place since the book was first published: the rise of the serial killer and the new level of political terrorism epitomised by the attack on the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. Colin contextualises these developments within the continuation of trends which existed long before the 21st century, while considering issues including Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Islamic militancy, Afghanistan and the Taliban, and the war in Yugoslavia.

  Maurice Bassett welcomes publishing inquiries from authors and copyright holders. He is currently publishing authors including Colin Wilson and Abraham Maslow as well as self-help and business titles. See the Links page for route to Maurice's website, www.ReinventingYourself.com

NEWS UPDATE MARCH 2006

* Colin has written an introduction to a new book Spirals: the Pattern of Existence by Geoff Ward, published by Green Magic (www.greenmagicpublishing.com) in the UK in March, 2006, at 9.99, and worldwide in August, 2006 (ISBN               0 9547 2309 0         0 9547 2309 0). You can read the introduction under Contributions from Colin.

    Spirals: the Pattern of Existence is the first book to reveal the full significance and prevalence of the spiral form in nature and human culture, embracing anthropology, molecular biology, zoology, astronomy, quantum physics, Jungian psychology, earth mysteries,  religion, philosophy and the wisdom of the ancients.

* Colin is currently revising his Atlantis and the Kingdom of Neanderthal which is to be published by Inner Tradition in the USA, and also in Japan (see Atlantis and the Old Ones summary under Contributions from Colin). UK publication will follow. Colin has also signed a contract for future publication of The Rise and Fall of the Angry Young Men (see the outline under Contributions from Colin) on which he is still working.

AUGUST 2005

Colin has contributed spoken word to the "Mayday! Mayday! The Stan
Gooch EP" by the ARC collective, which was released in mid-July (2005). Details can be found via this link http://www.tc-lethbridge.com/mayday_mayday/

  Colin has written an introduction to a biography of Kenneth Allsop, the late journalist, broadcaster, novelist and naturalist, which is to be published in the Summer, 2005. It is the second edition of Field of Vision: the Broadcast Life of Kenneth Allsop, by Mark Andresen, and will be published by Trafford (ISBN 1-4120-2407-2).

  Allsop, author of The Angry Decade (1958) which examined the literature of the 1950s, was a good friend of Colin’s in the Fifties and Sixties, and one of those who gave The Outsider an extremely favourable review when it was first published. A Fleet Street journalist and one of the first anchormen for BBC current affairs programmes, Allsop committed suicide in 1973. In the year after his death, the Kenneth Allsop Memorial Trust was formed, taking over the charitable administration of the island of Steep Holm in the Bristol Channel, a designated nature reserve and a site of special scientific interest.

UPDATE NOVEMBER 2004

If the lost city of Atlantis had indeed been found on the seabed off Crete, it proved that civilisation was much older than we thought, Colin told viewers on Channel 4’s Richard & Judy TV show on Wednesday (November 17).

  Colin appeared with American author Robert Sarmast who announced last weekend that his undersea exploration had discovered structures closely resembling Plato’s description of Atlantis.

Colin said that Sarmast’s discovery was likely to show that civilisation existed much further back than 8,000BC, the date it was supposed to have arisen in the Middle East. The Atlanteans would have had an extremely high level of culture, “with probably all kinds of things we can’t begin to imagine”.

  The Ancient Egyptian civilisation must have been founded on knowledge handed down by Atlantean flood survivors as it was too complex to have started from scratch in about 3,000BC, and must have had a much longer history.

  Colin then managed to toss in a squib about how there was probably a lot of gold waiting to be found in Atlantis - will there now be a gold rush to the Eastern Mediterranean, we wonder?

After the show, Colin said: “My initial response to Sarmast’s theory that Atlantis was Cyprus was that it was unlikely, since Plato says that Atlantis was beyond the Pillars of Hercules (ie, Straits of Gibraltar), and it has always been assumed to be in the Atlantic Ocean, hence its name. But when Professor Galanapoulos came up with his theory that Atlantis was the island of Santorini in the early 1960s, he pointed out that the two small capes of southern Greece, Maleas and Matapan (Taenarum), were also called the Pillars of Hercules, and Sarmast points out that so was the entrance into the Bosphorus. So, for someone in Greece, Cyprus would be beyond the Pillars of Hercules - but to the east, not west.

  “Although Rand Flem’Ath’s Antarctica theory of Atlantis seemed to me highly plausible, there was one major problem - that Plato says the Atlanteans were at war with the Athenians, and this was unlikely if Atlantis was thousands of miles away at the South Pole, or even if it was in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, as mapped by Athanasius Kircher, the learned Jesuit. There was also, of course, the problem of size. Plato said Atlantis was a huge land mass, a continent. But would a whole continent be able to disappear completely (in "a day and a night")? Surely not.

  “Galanapoulos had suggested the copyists of the Timaeus had simply added a nought too many to the figures, by mistaking two Egyptian hieroglyphics for 100 and 1,000, making the great plain to the south 270 miles by 300, instead of 27 by 30. And this same argument also applied to Cyprus. I agree that it seems unlikely that the Atlanteans and Athenians could have been at war when, according to Plato, the Egyptian priests told Solon that it had sunk about 9,000 years before their time, when Athens was certainly not around.

  “But then, I had come to accept Graham Hancock’s arguments, in Fingerprints of the Gods, that civilisation is probably many thousands of years older than we believe, so that Tiahuanaco in the Andes could date back to 15,000 BC. And I now think it likely that civilisation may be far older than that, for reasons I explain in my autobiography (speaking of Maurice Chatelain). So it does seem to me conceivable that if Atlantis was Cyprus, there was some kind of war with proto-Greeks.

  “The whole theory depends, of course, on the notion that the Mediterranean formed after the end of the last Ice Age, as the ice began to melt, and the barrier between the Atlantic and the landlocked area created by the collision of Europe and Africa, fell. I, like most people, had taken it for granted that this happened maybe five million years ago. But we have no evidence for this, since mud and silt cannot be carbon dated, so there is no good reason why the Med may not have appeared as recently as 13,000 years ago.

  “We now know the Black Sea formed only about 6,000BC, and if the Med has been around for millions of years, why is the Black Sea so much younger? Above all, Sarmast’s discovery of a plain of exactly the right size - 27 by 30 miles - and a ’temple hill’ with walls in exasctly the right place, six kilometres from the sea, makes it look at if most of the arguments against Atlantis being in the Med are irrelevant.”

A new book, The Voynich Manuscript, by Gerry Kennedy and Rob Churchill (published August 5, 2004, by Orion) discusses the “mix of fantasy and reality in the literary worlds” of Colin Wilson and H P Lovecraft, the New England horror story writer.

  The Voynich manuscript, discovered by antiquarian book dealer Wilfrid Voynich in an Italian monastery in 1912, is believed to date from the 16^th century, but is written in an unrecognisable language, and remains an enigma. It has never been deciphered, and continues to defy linguists, cryptologists and scholars.

  Kennedy and Churchill say that although Lovecraft does not mention the Voynich manuscript he must have been aware of it, for Lovecraft invented a supposedly arcane opus of the eighth century, The Necronomicon, which one of his heroes finds in a deserted church - “a small leather-bound record book filled with entries in some odd cryptographic medium”.

  The Necronomicon has become intertwined with the Voynich manuscript, say the co-authors, appearing in two works by Colin, The Return of the Lloigor (1969, 1974) and The Philosopher’s Stone (1969). In the former, a professor of English discovers a volume written in an Arabic based on Greek and Latin, and realises it is The Necronomicon. In the latter, Howard Lester and Sir Henry Littleway fall under the spell of the Great Old Ones and try to break it by studying The Necronomicon.