Robert Mapplethorpe

I usually feel like the role comes to you to sort of illuminate some piece of where you are in your life. I feel like I myself am a single woman and I'm childless - by choice - at this point, and I don't know what will happen.

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.