My best history professor started my first class with him (on Tudor/Stuart England) with, "If you don't read science fiction, you need to start now, because that's the mindset you need to cultivate to study history." And went on to explain that these were people with human nature like ours but extremely different cultural context, so one would need to be comfortable with thinking about how cultural context shaped motivation and action in order to really understand historical figures.

I loved him so much. We all did; one of my friends adopted him as a grandfather for friend's child.