Patrick O'Brian is evidence for me that fiction set in the past can illuminate my present. He wrote believable and complex (fictional male) characters, interact

Patrick O'Brian is evidence for me that fiction set in the past can illuminate my present. He wrote believable and complex (fictional male) characters, interacting in interesting ways, through lightly fictionalized real events with humor and a fair amount of ripping yarn/daring-do. For some writers a genre is a crutch - a thousand steel-capped dreadnoughts tearing through the yielding fabric of feebly protesting spacetime blah blah. For others, and O'Brian is the best I've come across, the genre is the constraint that forces true creativity. I think it is reasonable to observe that his female leads (modulo Clarissa Oakes maybe) are a bit cardboard cutout.