Tom Hooper

After my grandfather's plane took enemy fire, he was denied permission to land at the first available airstrip. In that classic British bureaucratic way, they said he had to go back to your own airbase in the Midlands. They crashed between the coast and the airfield.

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.