Julie London

I'd retired for about six or seven years. Coming back to the business, I found that I was sort of not quite a has-been, and it wasn't a new career, it was just kind of difficult to crack the nut, so to speak.

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.