India, Jan. 23 -- In Question 7, you note that the "bath before it [when the Hungarian-American physicist Leo Szilard had come up with the idea of a nuclear chain reaction] is pure fancy on my part." In a work of non-fiction, this liberty reminded me of Chilean writer Benjamin Labatut's statement that anything that comes out of a writer is fiction.

I don't mean it in a rude way but that's the wrong way of framing it. For me, stories are ways of discovering and revealing the truth, a way of parting the mist and seeing what's actually there. I think fiction succeeds in asking the right questions whereas it fails when it thinks it has the answers. Politics and religions propose answers. And they also lead us into periods of great distress a...