Michael Mullen

Some 70% to 80% of all who join the military will return to the civilian workforce. They'll return to communities, and one of the things I've worried about is the increasing disconnect between the American people and our men and women in uniform. We come from fewer and fewer places. We're less than 1% of the population.

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.