Phil Condit

We are moving toward a global economy. One way of approaching that is to pull the covers over your head. Another is to say: It may be more complicated - but that's the world I am going to live in, I might as well be good at it.

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.