Like memory, history was synthetic. Humans thought of both as factual records, but study after study confirmed that they were more like dreams, narratives constructed and reconstructed by the mind to fit the demands of the present, not the reality of the past.
I've always felt that writing history and science fiction are related endeavors. Both involve living life with an eye toward gleaning theories of how the world became what it is and the forces shaping what it might become. Both involve not only putting yourself into someone else's shoes, but doing so for people who inhabit a context totally foreign to your own. Both involve combining analysis and imagination. That is not to say that science fiction and history are equivalent, only that they are distant cousins to each other, as dreams are to memory.
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