Mark Foley

The gulf coast, we all know now, after Katrina, is responsible for 25 percent of U.S. production of natural gas. Following Katrina and Rita, almost 75 percent of the natural gas production in the gulf was shut down and not producing.

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.

Well, there's no question that the law passed in 1996 was flawed. It deregulated the wholesale market, meaning the price that the utilities had to pay energy companies for power, but not the retail market.