Um trabalho muito influente no gênero da ficção de conspiração foi O Illuminatus! Trilogy , de Robert Anton Wilson e Robert Shea, publicado em 1975. É uma mistura intencionalmente absurda de um grande número de teorias da conspiração, tanto reais (muitas inspiradas por cartas de teóricos da conspiração que Wilson teve quando trabalhava na Playboy) e inventou pelos autores. Um parágrafo da revisão sobre a versão do livro do assassinato de Kennedy dá um sabor:
Readers of The Illuminatus! Trilogy learn, for example, that John Dillinger, the infamous bank robber killed by the FBI outside a movie theater in 1934, actually survived the incident and turned up with a gun at Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. But he was late to the event: several other organizations had already placed operatives on the scene with orders to shoot the President —and the real question, according to Wilson and Shea, isn't who planned the assassination of JFK, but which gunman managed to pull the trigger first. But if you seek ultimate answers, you need to dig below the scene of the crime, to the underground lair of the Dealey Lama, whose office is located under the sewers of Dallas. He’s a wise robed and bearded man who presides over a powerful secret society, and is perhaps more influential than either the President or conspirators up on ground level.
Mas como a resenha também observa, os livros são projetados para confundir seu senso de realidade em uma espécie de estilo psicodélico de contracultura dos anos 60:
Yet as I look back at my description of this book, I realize that I have misled you. Because this book is just as serious as it is absurd. Even as Shea and Wilson pile up ludicrous incidents on top of one another, they also want to convey words of wisdom. As strange as it sounds, given my summary above, The Illuminatus! Trilogy wants to possess the authority of non-fiction. The authors add footnotes and appendices, and work hard to substantiate many of their claims with citations and evidence. Not all of the sources are real ones—I am rightly skeptical when any author backs up claims with references to the Necronomicon by the "mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred. But much of the documentation withstands scrutiny. Shea and Wilson add to the peculiar flavor of their work by frequently inserting long passages that can only be described as a counterculture philosophy of life. When you reach the final pages of this work, you will find that your greatest challenge as a reader is not evaluating the literary merits of the trilogy, but determining how much of it the authors themselves actually believe—and, by extension, how much credence you ought to give to their claims.