Among Others

the Great.
    “I was just going to start, but you’re not late,” Harriet said, smiling at him. (Harriet! I’ve never met anyone called Harriet in real life. I had a brief fantasy about her being Harriet Vane, because she’d be about the right age for that, except that Harriet Vane would be addressed as Lady Peter, and anyway she’s fictional. I can tell the difference, really I can.)
    The door banged open again and a teenage girl came in. She was wearing a purple blazer, which looked appalling with her ginger hair. She sat with the two boys in blazers, who, I saw now, had kept a seat for her between them. I felt … not exactly jealous, but I felt a sort of pang when I saw that.
    Then Harriet started to talk about Le Guin. She talked for about fifteen or twenty minutes. After that the talk became general. I talked far more than I should have. I knew it even at the time. I just couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t actually interrupt anyone, which would be unforgivable, I just didn’t hold back enough to give other people a turn. Miss Carroll didn’t say anything the whole time. The gorgeous boy said some very perceptive things about The Lathe of Heaven . One of the men, Keith I think, said it was like Philip K. Dick, which is nonsense, and the gorgeous boy said that while there were certain superficial similarities you can’t compare Le Guin to Dick because her characters are like people in ways his just aren’t, which is exactly what I’d have said. There’s also apparently a film of it, which nobody has seen.
    He also said that maybe she writes about the scientific process so well in The Dispossessed , despite not being a scientist, because she understands that creativity isn’t all that different across fields. He and Brian agreed that she did get the scientific process right, and everyone deferred to them about that, so they must be something scientific. I didn’t like to ask what. I’d already been talking too much, as I said. I kept thinking of things to say and ask, and thinking I’d said too much and should let other people speak, and then thinking of more things I just had to say, and saying them. I hope I didn’t totally bore everyone.
    The gorgeous boy—I must find out his name next time!—kept his eyes fixed on me when I was talking. It was quite disconcerting.
    The most interesting thing anyone said though was said by one of the boys in purple blazers. I had said that Le Guin’s worlds were real because her people were so real, and he said yes, but the people were so real because they were the people the worlds would have produced. If you put Ged to grow up on Anarres or Shevek in Earthsea, they wouldn’t be the same people, the backgrounds made the people, which of course you see all the time in mainstream fiction, but it’s rare in SF. That’s absolutely true, and it’s very interesting, and I couldn’t help jumping in again to say that it fit back with The Lathe of Heaven and what happens to people in the different worlds, and whether a grey person in a world of grey people was inherently a different person from a brown one in a mixed race world.
    I don’t know when I had such a good time, and if it wasn’t for worrying that I talked too much I’d say it was a total success. There’s a thing—I’ve noticed it often. When I first say something, it’s as if people don’t hear me, they can’t believe I’m saying it. Then they start to actually pay attention, they stop noticing that a teenage girl is talking and start to believe that it’s worth listening to what I’m saying. With these people, it was much less effort than normal. Pretty much from the second time I opened my mouth their expressions weren’t indulgent but attentive. I liked that.
    Afterwards, Keith asked who was coming to the pub. The gorgeous boy went, and Harriet, and Greg, but not the teenagers in school blazers, and not me, because I had to go back to school. Everyone said goodbye to me, but I got all awkward and tongue-tied again saying goodbye and hoping to see them next week.
    Miss Carroll had a word with Greg, and then we got back into her car and she drove back to school. “You don’t get a lot of chance to talk to people about things that matter to you, do you?” she asked.
    I stared out at the night and the dark. In between the traffic lights at the bottom of town and the school, there’s nothing to make light but the occasional farmhouse, which means car headlights seem an intrusion of