For the Chinese language tips, my thanks go to Stephanie Pow. Likewise, since I know no Japanese, I have to thank Troy McMullen (and his wife and sister-in-law!) for their help!
I read many books while researching The 6 Sacred Stones —from works about space and zero-point fields to more esoteric books about Stonehenge and other ancient places. I’d like to make special mention, first, of the works of Graham Hancock, which I just love and would recommend wholeheartedly to anyone who wants to view global history from an unconventional point-of-view, and second, of a little gem of a book called Stonehenge by Robin Heath. It was in this book that I first saw the theory that connects Stonehenge to the Great Pyramid through a series of right-angle triangles.
I must also send out my heartfelt thanks to Peter and Lorna Grzonkowski for their very generous donations to the Bullant Charity Challenge. The twins in the novel, Lachlan and Julius Adamson, are named after their nephews.
Likewise, Paul and Lenore Robertson, two long-time supporters of my work and another couple who do an enormous amount for charity, for their donations at not one but two ASX-Reuters Charity Dinners! Paul, I hope you don’t mind that I made you a smooth-talking double-crossing bad-guy CIA agent!
And last of all, I thank The WAGS, a great group of guys with whom I play golf on Wednesday afternoons, for their generous donation on behalf of Steve Oakes, the leader of this motley crew. In return for their kind donation to charity, I named a character at the start of this book after Oaksey, and promptly riddled him with bullets. As the boys say, no one likes to see that, but such are the dangers of having a character named after you in a Matthew Reilly book!
To everyone else, family and friends, as always, thank you for your continued encouragement.
—Matthew Reilly
Sydney, Australia
September 2007
AN INTERVIEW WITH MATTHEW REILLY
THE WRITING OF THE 6 SACRED STONES
SPOILER WARNING!
The following interview contains Spoilers from The 6 Sacred Stones.Readers who have not read the novel are advised to avoid reading this interview as it does give away major plot moments from the book.
Q:Let’s get straight to the biggest question of all: how could you end The 6 Sacred Stones with Jack West Jr. falling into a bottomless abyss?
MR: Okay, okay! Yes, I figured this might be an issue, and this is certainly the best place to talk about it. (Hey, I think the interview at the end of Scarecrow saved me from countless emails about what I did in that book!)
When I sat down to write The 6 Sacred Stones, I asked myself, “How can I make this book totally different from the others? What can I do that will be completely unexpected?”
My answer: come up with the biggest, boldest, most outrageous novel yet with the biggest, boldest, most outrageous cliffhanger ending imaginable, one in which the fate of the hero literally hangs in the balance at the end of the book (and as those who have read my other books will know, I love a good cliffhanger). This worked out very well when it became apparent to me that the story I had come up with (involving six pillars being placed at six vertices) was going to be too big to achieve in one book. So the ending is merely the midway point of a larger adventure. I’ve often ended chapters with dire cliffhangers, just think of this as a huge chapter ending!
Jack may well get out of his terrible predicament—indeed one method for his survival has been inserted into the book (and no, it’s not Horus); the fun is in waiting to find out how. The way I see it, it’s a bit like waiting for the next season of a TV show that has ended on a cliffhanger. So in the end, I apologize to everyone for making you wait in such an awful way, but I promise it will be worth it!
Q:7 Deadly Wondersand The 6 Sacred Stones have seen an increase in the scale of your books (solar rays, dark stars, vast ancient structures). What exactly are you trying to achieve with this series?
MR:What I am trying to achieve is really quite simple: I want to create a Lord of the Rings –style epic set in our world, in the present day.
I want it to be a story that is part adventure and part myth in which a small group of seemingly powerless characters struggle against the mighty and all-powerful.
There is another reason for it, too, one that is purely for me as an author. In his Introduction to The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote of his reason for writing that tale: “The prime motive was the desire of a taleteller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them.”
Same here.
I just wanted to try my hand at a really big epic story: a grand sweeping adventure that spans the globe, that looks out at the Sun and space itself, that examines the mysterious ancient places scattered around our planet, and in which—most important of all—the protagonists, in the course of carrying out thrilling feats of heroism, endure profound tests of their character. I also just wanted to try to write a long story.
So in contrast to the Shane Schofield/Scarecrow books, which bring back the same hero in separate adventures, the story begun in 7 Deadly Wonders and continued in The 6 Sacred Stones is actually one big story (indeed, this is why the sections titled “A Girl Named Lily” begin with Part III in this book, Parts I and II having appeared in the earlier novel).
Q:Tell us about some of the “mysterious ancient places” that appear in this book and why you chose them?
MR:I love ancient places and ancient things—from the pyramids to the Rosetta Stone. I can just gaze at them all day long—especially when they defy explanation.
Having explored the Great Pyramid and its fellow “Wonders” in 7 Deadly Wonders, I decided to focus on some of my other favorite ancient places in this book, among them Stonehenge, Abu Simbel, and the Three Gorges region of the Yangtze River in China. (There are, of course, many others that I love just as much, but I’m keeping them for the next book!) I have visited all three of these places.
