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The success of Hawking's book is itself an interesting story. How did this happen? How did a challenging book on an esoteric topic sell millions of copies? Colleagues began to wonder if they should jump on this newly respectable bandwagon of science popularization; publishers looked about eagerly for a piece of the new literary action. Spinoffs appeared, riding on the book's seemingly infinite coattails. A Reader's Companion appeared in 1992. Hawking wrote his own account of the book's success, "A Brief History of A Brief History," which appeared in Black Holes and Baby Universes, a short collection of essays published in 1993. A Briefer History of Time, described on the cover as "More Accessible, More Concise, Illustrated, and Updated with the Latest Research," appeared in 2005. Hawking's 2001 The Universe in a Nutshell, and a few edited volumes, complete his modest output of science popularization.

Hawking wrote his Brief History to meet financial needs generated by his advancing illness, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), better known as "Lou Gehrig's disease," which gradually destroys motor neurons, in turn limiting one's ability to initiate and control muscle movement. Although the disease leads to complete physical paralysis, the majority of those afflicted with ALS suffer no mental impairment. Hawking, for example, has continued to work productively even after his physical limitations advanced to the point that all he could do was wiggle one finger.

"I suspect that Hawking—who may be less a truth seeker than an artist, an illusionist, a cosmic joker—knew all along that finding and empirically validating a unified theory would be extremely difficult, even impossible. His declaration that physics was on the verge of finding The Answer may well have been an ironic statement, less an assertion than a provocation."

—John Horgan in The End of Science. Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (1997)

Hawking's ALS showed up in the early 1970s when he was barely thirty and turned simple tasks like getting into bed into major challenges. Initially he had one of his students live with him and his wife Jane to help him manage personal tasks. Fortunately for Hawking, his great fame guaranteed that there were always students eager to do this—even cosmology has its groupies. By the early 1980s, his disease had so slurred his speech that only people very familiar with Hawking could understand him; many of his public appearances at this time included one of his students, who would interpret his inscrutable monotone mumbling. There was the looming financial pressure of his children's education. And expensive nurses were now required to supplement the care provided by his students and the long-suffering Jane.

Hawking was encouraged to spin some money out of his growing fame by writing a popular book on cosmology, an idea he rejected at first; scientists writing "popular" books were typically regarded by their peers with disdain. He eventually gave in, however, and met with an editor from Cambridge University Press, explaining that he needed to write a book that would make money. The editor responded that Hawking's proposed "popular" science manuscript, with equations on every page, might not turn out to be all that popular. A publishing dictum suggests that each equation cuts a book's sales in half. Applied to Hawking's manuscript, this formula predicted sales in the single digits.

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