Billy Beane

Trying to build a team over the course of the winter to put on the field is really just half the job. Because if your best players go down, it's not so much him going down as who you replace him with, which ultimately might have the biggest impact on how you end up finishing. So you want to have both a belt and suspenders for support.

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.