Robin Robertson of Psychological Perspectives points out that "beneath the skeptic, I find he is drawn to the magical side of life . . . he is not the model agnostic he holds up as ideal." Such criticisms are hidden under a deluge of appreciative comments. RAW was criticised harshly by members of the science community after the publication of The New Fundamentalists in 1986, but he has managed to avoid the kind of criticisms about integrity levelled at his friend Timothy Leary.

More glaring are comments by Gnosis magazine contributor Jay Cornell in a review of Cosmic Trigger II: Down To Earth that Wilson's later work suffered from "predictable '80s pop leftism or nostalgic sentimentalism about the '60s" and that "his trickster act needs updating."

Wilson responded to this harsh indictment of his work by stating, "I never respond to that kind of criticism. First, nobody can be objective about his own work, and you make a fool of yourself if you pretend that you can. Second, if perchance my work has anything of lasting value, it will go on, as it has gone on for two decades, getting reprinted continually, and Cornell can't stop it. On the other hand, if my work has no real lasting value, it will eventually all go out of print, and I can't persuade people they ought to buy it to make me happy."

In a 1976 Science Fiction Review interview he felt that his books should "leave the reader with the feeling that the universe is capable of doing something shocking within the next 5 minutes. Life without certainty can be exhilirating, liberating, a great adventure. I hope to create a real sense of awe, which is all the religion we need, and all we can honestly expect in this day and age."

On the topic of literary criticism itself, RAW revealed, "I'm probably too sensitive, but so are a lot of artists. Richard Burton gave up reading all reviews, because he went into such dark suicidal depressions whenever he saw a bad one. Hart Crane and Ross Lockeridge actually did kill themselves because of critics. I don't get that wounded, but I do feel pain. Why hide this? Critics know that most artists are sensitive. They would get no fun out of their vicious work if they didn't know it hurts. Sadists don't attack inanimate objects. They want victims who feel pain."

Despite Cornell's criticisms, RAW is still as relevant in the 1990s as ever. A recent essay in his Trajectories newsletter criticised the defence of the military-industrial complex by 'futurist' Alvin Toffler, author of the classic Future Shock (1971), now spokesperson for the Progress & Freedom Association. With the election of Republican Senator Newt Gingrich as House Speaker, Toffler has been elevated to guru-like status, serving as an adviser to various government departments, and being regularly quoted by Gingrich. Toffler's closest rival, author John Megatrends Naisbitt, and right wing sci-fi author Jerry Pournelle, have also pushed for rises in military/high-tech industry/NASA spending. Pournelle was an avid supporter of the Star Wars or SDI (Strategic Defence Initiative) in the early 1980s, giving a vision that space is a new frontier like the Wild West once was, only bigger. This rush to put mankind into space as a priority echoes Leary's admirable Space Migration work on the surface, but is more like the visions of pulp writer Robert Heinlein, who lobbied the Eisenhower Administration in the 1950s for similar industry subsidies, believing space to be the final utopia.

RAW is far more pragmatic. "The I-squared (Intelligence Intensification) part of Leary's SMIČLE program has always seemed to me more important than the SM (space migration) and LE (Life Extension.) Without more brains, we won't get more space or more time.

"I would tend to see this emerging culture as another sign of the fundamentalist materialism I've criticised in the past. Certainly, Futurism or Future Studies seem to have split into two camps. First, the Utopians like Barbara Marx Hubbard and the people carrying on Bucky Fuller's work (they have about four different groups, advancing different parts of Bucky's scenario.) Then, on the other side, the ones who call themselves the nuts-and-bolts realists. I regard them as "crackpot realists" in the sense in which the sociologist C. Wright Mills used that term. They define realism by the norms of the ruling class and then work within those parameters. I think all work within those ruling class parameters is doomed and pointless. The information revolution is changing everything so totally that we have to think outside the traditional Master/Serf paradigm, so the Utopians, who did get out of that grid, make more sense to me. I agree with Riane Eisler - the Dominator model is collapsing and a Partnership model will replace it. So, the Tofflers and their glorification of war seem anti-Futurist to me. War is the ultimate schoolyard bully form of Dominator ethos, unfortunately magnified into mass murder. This paradigm will destroy humanity unless we transform it into a Partnership/Negotiation paradigm."

Hakim Bey, the author of Temporary Autonomous Zones and an ally of Wilson's argues that such control of new technology by corporations will only continue the current neo-feudalism pervading our society. In TAZ he writes "certain doctrines of "Futurology" remain problematic. For example, even if we accept the liberatory potential of such new technologies as TV, computers, robotics, Space exploration, etc., we still see a gap between potentiality & actualization. The banalization of TV, the yuppification of computers & the militarization of Space suggest that these technologies in themselves provide no "determined" guarantee of their liberatory use."