Paul Manafort

They get the faceless bureaucrats in Brussels and Strasbourg who have ruled and told the Brits how to live and making promises for them that their lives would get better and talking about a future based on globalism versus family and individual and local community. That's what Brexit was all about.

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.