Marvin Bower

My grandma actually put me in girdles when I was around nine or ten because I had hips even then, and she didn't want boys to be attracted to me. Having hips meant you were a full-grown woman, and I was too young for that.

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.

By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.