The trilogy was originally written between 1969 and 1971 while Wilson and Shea were both associate editors for "Playboy" magazine. As part of the role, they dealt with correspondence from the general public on the subject of civil liberties, much of which involved paranoid rants about imagined conspiracies. The pair began to write a novel with the premise that "all these nuts are right, and every single conspiracy they complain about really exists". In a 1980 interview given to the science fiction magazine "Starship", Wilson suggested the novel was also an attempt to build a myth around Discordianism: