Among Others

style matters or only ideas, the division would have been really different from whether Zelazny has good ideas. I think he does, and I think both matter, which isn’t to say that the Foundation books suck because they have no style, or Clarke either. Zelazny can get where he’s all style and no substance—I can’t forget Creatures of Light and Darkness after all, which almost put me off him forever. But mostly he keeps the balance.
    We talked about Amber and what’s going to happen, and we talked about the kind of wisecracking voice he uses in those and in Isle of the Dead and This Immortal and we talked about whether it was actually science fiction or fantasy. Hugh thinks the Amber books are fantasy, and so is Isle of the Dead , because despite the aliens and everything, worldbuilding is talked about in such magical terms. “That’s condemning him for being poetic!” Wim said.
    “Saying it’s fantasy isn’t condemnation,” Harriet said.
    So, a good meeting. Afterwards Wim said to Greg, “Do you have a recent Ansible ?”
    There’s a magazine, a “fanzine” called Ansible ! It’s for information about what’s going on in the SF fan world, it’s funny, and it’s so exactly what I would have called it that I love the author, Dave Langford, sight unseen without meeting him. Ansibles are from The Dispossessed and they’re faster-than-light communication devices. Brilliant. All the details about Albacon in Glasgow at Easter were in Greg’s copy, and I copied them down, and all I have to do now is get the money from Daniel when I see him, probably at half term, which is at the end of next week, and send it off.
    Walking out of the library, Wim held my hand. “Are you sure I can’t see you until Saturday?” he said. “Will you be locked up in school the whole time?”
    “Well yes, apart from going to Shrewsbury Thursday afternoon for acupuncture,” I said.
    “What time are you going?” he asked.
    “On the half-past one train—but don’t you have to work?”
    “I work mornings and go to college in the afternoons,” he said. “That’s how I came to see you in hospital, remember? I can skive off tomorrow afternoon if I want to. Nobody cares.”
    “Skive” is like “mitch,” it means “skipping school.” That’s what they say around here. The first time I heard it I had no idea what it meant.
    “You’ll care when it gets to the exams,” I said.
    “I won’t even notice,” he said. “I’ll meet you in Gobowen railway station, all right?”
    Greg drove me back to school, as normal. “So, I was right,” he said.
    I blushed. I don’t think he saw in the darkness. “Sort of,” I admitted.
    “Well, good luck.”
    “Hot jets,” I replied.
    Greg laughed. “I’ve always said that what Wim needs is a girlfriend who could quote Heinlein at him.”
    Has he always said that? Or does he only think he always said that because I did the karass-magic? Greg existed before I did it. I know he did. I met him in the library. But he never said a word to me beyond not letting me join the first day and then taking my interlibrary loan cards. Was the book group, and SF fandom, there all the time, or did it all come into being when I did that magic, to give me a karass? Was there Ansible ? I know they think there was, that there were conventions going back to 1939, and certainly science fiction was there all the time. There’s no proving anything once magic gets involved.
    I’m going to have to tell Wim. It’s the only ethical thing.
    T HURSDAY 7 TH F EBRUARY 1980
    I set off from school with even more of a sense of escaping this week, even though it was raining, the kind of irresistible damp drizzle that gets through every crack. If I had clothes of my own here I could have changed into them before leaving, but I don’t so I couldn’t. Arlinghurst wants its girls to be recognisable at all times. If they could make us wear the uniform in the holidays they would. At least the coat is good and solid, and the hat might be awful but it does keep the rain off, mostly.
    Wim was waiting in Gobowen station. It’s not much of a station, more like a bus shelter beside the line with a ticket machine and a couple of empty hanging baskets. He was sitting in the shelter with his feet up on the glass, folded up like a paperclip. His bike was chained to the railings outside, getting wet. There was a fat woman with a child sitting next to him, and a balding man with a briefcase, all in raincoats. Wim was