A Brief History of Time, the international bestseller which purports to unravel the fundamental questions of the universe in 144 pages, is about to become briefer.

Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge physicist whose 1988 blockbuster spawned a fascination with science books, is to write a more accessible version in a tacit admission that many of his 10m or more readers found the original impenetrable.

The new work - to be published next autumn - is likely to be titled A Brief History of Time for Children or for Young Adults, and will be aimed at readers aged 12 upwards.

But the audience is expected to be far wider. "It will be bought for children, not necessarily by children, but I think a lot of adults - and I include myself - will buy it to understand better what we have read in the original," said Patrick Janson-Smith, the managing director of Professor Hawking's publishers, Transworld. "The aim is to put it in a form that's understandable."

With fewer words - it is expected to run to 100 pages -and more pictures, the new version is being written in collaboration with Leonard Mlodinow, an American scientist who worked at the California Institute of Technology before moving to Hollywood, where he co-wrote Star Trek.

Prof Hawking, who suffers from the muscle-wasting motor neurone disease, had a cameo role in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, cementing his iconic status.

The work will initially appear in hardback, but it will swiftly move into softback and is expected to become a bestseller. The 1988 blockbuster, which was turned into a TV series, was in the Sunday Times non-fiction bestseller list for more than four years and has been translated into 35 languages. Yet A Brief History of Time became notorious as one of the most frequently unfinished books.