Sandra Lerner

Cisco never had a red quarter. Never. Took us three years to get funding, and in those three years, we were never in the red, and that was because we had two products to sell. They were not sexy or cool, but we had enough of a market that we could generate enough of a cash stream to grow the company.

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.