Jan Mark

When writers for adults contemplate Venice, they behold decay, dereliction and death. Thomas Mann, Daphne du Maurier, L. P. Hartley and Salley Vickers have all dispatched hapless protagonists to Italy, where they see Venice - and die.

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.