Melanne Verveer

I have seen businesses and government come together to provide women entrepreneurs with the training they need to better access markets, take advantage of trade agreements, and in the process grow businesses, jobs, and GDP. These are partnerships that transform lives.

Investments in women are positively correlated to growth, prosperity, stability, democracy, health - and vital to our national security. We cannot write off the talent of half the world and expect to confront our challenges.

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.