The library must have been built about a hundred years ago. It’s Victorian, with stone windows in brick walls. The room where they have the meetings was once a reading room, but now the reading room is the reference library upstairs and this is kept locked. It has wood panels to about elbow height, and above that it’s painted cream between the windows—there are lots of windows on one side, but I couldn’t see what was outside because it was dark. On the other long wall there’s a huge dark Victorian painting of people sitting in a library reading, looking down at their backs as they sit at little tables among rows of bookshelves. This room isn’t like that at all—there’s one big old table in the middle with old wooden chairs around it. There are two busts, one at each end of the rectangular room. One is Descartes, who I don’t know but who has a wonderful face, and the other is Plato, yes!
I sat on the side of the table facing the picture, with my back to the windows, and Miss Carroll sat down next to me. The men, who all knew each other of course, were standing up talking. Some more men came in, some of them younger, but none of them much under thirty. Then two boys came in, wearing the purple school blazers of the local comprehensive school. I’d guess they were sixteen or seventeen. I was starting to think there weren’t going to be any women when a stout grey-haired woman bustled in and sat at the head of the table. She had a big pile of Le Guin books in hardcover editions and she put them down next to her in a businesslike way. Seeing this, the others started to take seats. I was wishing I’d brought copies, but of course I didn’t have any except my dear old Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Volume 2. My mother still has all my books, but books are replaceable.
Miss Carroll was looking at the pile of books a bit nervously. “Have you read all those,” she asked me quietly.
I looked at them properly, and I had, all except one called The Eye of the Heron. “All but one,” I said. “And I’ve read one that isn’t there, The Word For World is Forest.”
“You really do read a lot of sci fi,” she said.
Just then the grey-haired woman took a deep breath as if she were about to begin, and as she did the door opened and a boy—a young man—practically fell in to the room. He’s the most gorgeous thing I ever saw, with longish blond hair flopping about his head, extremely blue eyes, a passionately intense gaze, though I didn’t see that at once, and a kind of casual grace of movement even when tripping over his own feet. “I’m sorry I’m late, Harriet,” he said, favouring the woman with a dazzling smile. “The bike had a puncture.”
It seemed a cruel trick of the gods that such a glorious creature should have to go about on a bicycle. He sat down directly opposite me, so close that I could see the raindrops beading on his hair. He must be eighteen or nineteen. I wonder why he isn’t in university? He has somewhat the look of a lion, or of a young Alexander 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.