#WritersCoffeeClub Aug. 15 - From which real-world events have you taken inspiration?

So many, since I mostly write #historicalFiction and riff off the historical or archaeological record to flesh out into stories. What if Princess Neferure of the 18th Dynasty of Egypt suddenly disappeared from the historical record because she got her gay happily-ever-after? What if an ancient Chinese war sparked off by a dispute over trees had a star-crossed queer love story at its heart?

This is fairly standard for the genre, but there are events I'm taking "out of period" into a much more ancient era, like the 13th-century defense of Chungju Fortress from the Mongol army. The commander, charged with defending the fortress with a force of soldiers and enslaved people who had already suffered much from the war, freed the enslaved and promised all of them official titles. There's no record of any of that happening in 1st century BCE (where records themselves are fairly scant), but I'm taking inspiration from that for use in my own big WIP.

I'm also developing a couple of science fiction ideas that take off from real-life events, such as the "AI" tech companies' breathtakingly brazen legal defense that copyright laws shouldn't apply to them because that's the only way their businesses can exist. So what other laws are they willing to blow past for their survival and growth, and how far will they be allowed to go?

Another is the noise about the human settlement of Mars which I think is a giant scam and probable money laundering scheme, but supposing for a second it happens--what kind of resources are we looking at for such a project to happen? Where are they going to come from, and how would the extraction happen? What would the aftermath look like? And so on.