Writing about Outrageous Hypotheses and Extraordinary Possibilities: A View from The Trenches

By Graham Hancock

Life is a mystery that will not be easily explained.

It is not simply a matter of how the physical processes of life began on Earth - although that is a problem for which the best scientific minds of the modern age have failed to come up with an answer.

But it is also the question of whether our lives have any meaning - a question to which religion responds with a resounding 'yes', and to which science by and large responds with a resounding 'no'.

My own involvement with this mystery has been as an author of mass-market books of 'alternative history' - a genre that Britain's Guardian newspaper has credited me with inventing. I have never wished, nor sought, to be anything other than a professional author - in other words to make a living from my writing. In recent years I have made a good living and I hope this is because millions of individual readers around the world have found my books entertaining and intellectually stimulating. If people have been lured into buying my books only by the hype - because they hope they will find some revelation or transcendental truth concealed therein - then I have not done my job properly.