Another queen of the short story. I’ve been reading Ursula Le Guin since my teens, and rereading and discovering entirely different meanings as I grow into her stories. I could have chosen a baker’s dozen of stories just by Ursula – the only author I ever wrote a fan letter to (so far!)
I was looking for Sea Road, but it too has disappeared. Most of the stories in Buffalo Gals are slight and mischievous, and ‘Direction of Road’ is too, but also mind-bending in its exploration of relativity, as a tree grows and experiences the change of pace as walkers become horse riders become jalopy owners become an entire traffic jam, for whom the tree must accomplish the increasingly complex task of appearing to grown closer/bigger and diminish so that the poor humans think they are actually going somewhere.
First published in Orbit 14, 1984, and collected in Buffalo Gals, Roc Fantasy, 1990
A Personal Anthology 