Jeffrey Eugenides

Basically, I get paid to be crazy. I get paid to believe I'm someone else, live in a completely false reality, and believe it's real. And that's a little scary. And I do it to the best of my ability. But it's kind of like swimming out to sea. You have to leave enough energy to swim back, and sometimes you get scared you swam too far.

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.