Helen Clark

Well, we don't think for a moment that either the U.S. or Australia are out to damage the New Zealand economy, but if there were a sustained period in which they had a free-trade agreement and New Zealand didn't have that same arrangement with the States, that could be both trade- and investment-distorting.

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.