Amanda Lohrey

Well, I was watching a documentary on dreams, and it was looking into the difference between dreams and, say, hallucinations or visions or other kinds of experiences.

And it mentioned the work of a distinguished American psychiatrist, John Mack, who's long dead.

who was a professor of psychiatry at Harvard, very respectable man, and he had conducted research into people who claimed to be aliens, or rather to have been abducted by aliens.

And he ended up believing them, and so Harvard sacked him.

He got a good lawyer and got himself reinstated on the grounds of free speech, which in those days was at the core of American rights, not so much now.

And I didn't want to write a novel based on John Mack.

The main character in Capture is in no way like him, other than that he's a distinguished psychiatrist.

But I started thinking about something that's always interested me, preoccupied me since I was young, and that is the question, philosophical question of doubt.

How do we know what we know?

How can we be certain that what we know is true?

And

It seemed to me, particularly when I was young and I taught politics in a university, that the ability psychologically to live with doubt and uncertainty to a degree is the basis of all civilised behaviour.

But it can become a kind of psychological burden and we can often kind of take a flight into certainty.

You see that on both sides of the political spectrum.

People who are absolutely certain about a great deal won't enter into any debate about it.

So I wanted to find a way in fiction to write about radical doubt.

How do we live with it?

What happens when we're confronted with it in a really extreme form, which in this case is very extreme.

There's probably no more extreme form than the question of aliens, simply because we can't prove they exist.

But we can't prove that they don't exist.