Jacob Lew

We cannot win the future, expand the economy and spur job creation if we are saddled with increasingly growing deficits. That is why the president's budget is a comprehensive and responsible plan that will put us on a path toward fiscal sustainability in the next few years - a down payment toward tackling our challenges in the long term.

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.