Tom Baker

We are pre-disposed for fantasy, there is a natural impulse for human beings to want to get off their heads or out of their heads in something in a substance or a drink or an idea or a religion which will comfort them and make life exciting.

I used to always be putting my hat on children being photographed and then getting home and discovering I was riddled with lice. That used to happen very, very regularly. I used to get headlice all the time.

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.