Norm Dicks

What I did was sit down with the Washington State officials, with the historic preservation people, with the tribe, the local community, the port of Port Angeles, and we worked this thing out, and we protected the tribe's interest.

You probably have to have redundant levee systems with canals in between them, like the Dutch have, to make sure that incoming water is channeled off to areas where you deal with it rather than have it drown you.

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.