Mike Pence

I said after 2006 that Republicans didn't just lose our majority, we lost our way. I mean, our party walked away from the principles that men in our national governing majority first in 1980 and again in 1994, and the American people walked away from us.

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.