Sometimes we make assumptions about influence when similarities between two writers' work are so strong, but they're still just assumptions. Some things are sort of zeitgeist-y. There's a collective consciousness and we're all drawing from it.

Most of my writing is an effort, one way or another, to figure something out about myself, and often when I read dialogue between my characters I recognize it as a discussion between two aspects of my own personality, aspects which are too often at odds.

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.

Oscar Pistorius is now infamous for reasons that I think everybody knows about, but when I hit on his story and put it in the book, what I found fascinating was a description, from one of the scientists who helped Pistorius, of what the Paralympics will become. Because they don't place any restriction on enhancements for athletes, in the very near future the Paralympics will bear a closer resemblance to NASCAR than to the traditional Olympics. There will be a human-machine melding that will result in crazy feats of athleticism.

Whenever someone asks me craft questions like that I feel like I can give one of two answers. I can give the academy answer and say that it was very deliberate and I had a plan in mind and I executed that plan exactly to the letter. But this isn't the case.

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.

As an atheist and lapsed Catholic, I feel the absence of faith in my own life quite acutely.