I haven't written a whole lot of nonfiction, but what I have written leads me to believe that it's an entirely different muscle. The ongoing paradox is that sometimes it's harder to get to the emotional truth of something when you only have the facts at your disposal.

On a micro level, if we're not terribly lucky, this sort of thing can happen to us quite frequently - the political becoming the personal in dramatic and irreparable ways. I remember the first time I went out into the desert, passing by all these mine fields and getting the history on them from my guide and realizing all these murderous mechanisms were real, were just sitting out there waiting for a victim, and some of them had been for sixty, seventy, eighty years.

Jay Wexler is my kind of writer--a weird one, and a wry one, and one who isnt afraid to act silly in a sort of bait-and-switch that, to the readers surprise, moves him as much as it makes him laugh. Like all the best comedians, Wexler is clearly nursing a heart that the world broke a long time ago. Ed Tuttle is a book that cant decide what it wants to be when it grows up, but as with most cases of arrested development, theres something very serious going on behind all the antics. Plus, there are pictures.

A lot of the despair we feel watching the news every day flows from our sense of helplessness, and as a fiction writer you get to control things, if only on the page. You get to run the show. You can right wrongs, bring departed loved ones back to life, even take vengeance on God, if that's your thing.

Some people believe that everyone will experience judgment day. But it's my understanding that the Judgment Day or Rapture that I'm going to experience, as a nonbeliever, is not going to be the good part. That's the essential difference between the Singularity and what we're usually told about the fate of our eternal souls.

I haven't written a whole lot of nonfiction, but what I have written leads me to believe that it's an entirely different muscle. The ongoing paradox is that sometimes it's harder to get to the emotional truth of something when you only have the facts at your disposal.

Singularity is seen as an event horizon. There's everything that comes before it and everything that comes after it and never the twain shall meet, in much the same way that Judeo-Christian theology presents its notion of the afterlife - there's a very clear and impermeable demarcation there.