you can’t draw imaginary future histories without a map of the past that your readers will accept as their own.
Science fiction tends to behave like a species of history pointing in the opposite direction, up the timeline rather than back. But you can’t draw imaginary future histories without a map of the past that your readers will accept as their own.
The less you think your map of the past imaginary (or contingent), the more conventionally you tend to stride forward into your imaginary future. Many of the authors I read as a boy possessed remarkably solid maps of the past.
