Speculative fraud hypothesis

[dashstofsk]

Why go through all the trouble of making a complex cipher if you could sell the book just as easily with it saying nothing at all?

'Just as easily to say nothing'? A book that said nothing would not be taken seriously. Also it would not be easy. If the author had written the book in the local language that everyone could read then he would have had to spend time making the text logical, readable, informative, grammatically correct with no spelling mistakes. The text would need to flow in an easy narrative and have something meaningful to say. Most probably everyone who has written academic papers, books, written a web site, even written topics for this forum knows that composing text is not always easy. You sometimes need to consult dictionaries and thesauri searching for just the right word, and debate with yourself whether to include this or that sentence and where it should go.

If the author of the VMS had some sort of method for constructing artificial text that looked like being in some foreign and unknown language, and was fluent in the use of the method then it might have been easier to do it that way.

And this is the scenario that I consider to be plausible:

The author is not a skilled writer. Is no Charles Dickens who had the ability to write at long sittings page after page without correction. He possibly was unfamiliar with the secret sciences that seem to be the subject of the VMS, and would be unable to write with authority on it. His nescience would have been immediately obvious and his book would have been immediately dismissed.

Not being able to write convincingly he had the inspiration to create a fabricated narrative in a bogus alphabet and claimed that it was a product from some distant undiscovered land. No need for any grammatical correctness or to give the text meaning. He could just bash the words out as they came. This would actually be more rewarding since a book from some unknown land would be viewed with curiosity and could command a higher premium.