Here’s something Monica Byrne told Andrew about her influences before The Girl in the Road Reading Club kicked off:

And then there’s my holy trinity of short stories: “Small Change,” “Schrödinger’s Cat,” and “The Author of the Acacia Seeds” by Ursula K. Le Guin, from The Compass Rose. I read and reread those. I just want to be as good as those, all the time.

To prepare for the reading club, then, and to get the most out of The Girl in the Road, I went back and read Byrne’s Holy Trinity from Le Guin’s 1982 short fiction collection, and compiled a few thoughts on each.

Before looking at each, though, here’s the quick and dirty: these are strange, experimental stories. If you’re familiar with Ursula K. Le Guin (Backlisted for Wizard of Earthsea), you know the depths of creativity that she is capable of reaching. Her novels are inventive not only in their science-fiction and story elements, but in their technical work and craft as well.

If you’re familiar with the short-fiction as a genre, these are stories are in the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges, Donald Barthelme and others who found in short-fiction a freedom in story concept and form that can be confusing, invigorating and hilarious. In these three stories, Le Guin is playing to the full extent of her formal capacity, working in a format that is ripe for play and experimentation.

They’re so weird in fact, that citing them as inspiration for her own work has significantly amped my excitement for Byrne’s novel. The three cumulatively only total about 30 pages. If you’ve the time, you should check them out.

Small Change

There are rooms in this house that I’ve never even opened.

“Small Change” is the most direct and straightforward story of these three. In it, a woman finds a new door in her house which leads to labyrinthine series of hallways. She finds them because she is dead. She asks her niece for coins (small change) to pay the ferryman and cross the river to the land of the dead, though she delays her departure for some time. The aunt, coins under her tongue, hangs around the house, exploring the new rooms and discussing matters with her niece, until the time of her funeral, after which she disappears. The girl is left alone, and barricades herself in the home until she dies. Her aunt returns, scolds her, then scolds the ferryman before providing passage for herself and her niece across the river.

“Small Change” makes much fun with classical mythology here, of course, with the river and the fee to pay the ferryman to cross the river to the land of the dead. There’s magical realism with the hallways lined with gold and what resembles a church “but not a religious church.” A place in the world of living only accessible to the dead makes for something new. The ferryman is real, and capable of pity and annoyance.

My favorite detail in the story is that here, the living haunt the dead (“My aunt came up out of the floor in the middle of the room…she looked very dark, like dirt, and she was much smaller than she had been. “Let me be!” She said. I was too terrfied to speak. “Let me go!” My aunt said.”).

Agoraphobia is a theme I’ve seen elsewhere in Le Guin. Here, it’s quite a somber affair, all around.

The Author of the Acacia Seeds

Because their script resembles Dolphin in form, we should never have assumed that it must resemble Dolphin in content. And indeed it does not. There is of course the same extraordinary wit, flashes of crazy humor, the inventiveness, and the inimitable grace.

“The Author of the Acacia Seeds” makes “Small Change” look like child’s play.” I imagine a young Ursula Le Guin laughing giddily as she wrote this story, which consists of three separate entries in an academic journal dedicated to Therolinguistics, the study of nature’s languages. The first is the explication of Ant verses written on seeds. The verses are like scripture, it would seem, reminiscent of proverbs (“Long are the tunnels. Longer is the untunneled”) and the work of the interpreter is like that of biblical scholarship (“There has already been considerable dispute over the interpolation of the phrase on Seed 31).

The second segment is a discussion of the beautiful poetry of the Penguin languages, and how they differ from Dolphin (“Dolphins do not lay eggs. A world of difference lies in that fact.”). The third is an editorial by the President of the Therolinguistics Association, ruminating on the nature of language and art, on the future of the field, the possible discovery of plant languages, and even the possibility of rock language.

“The Author of the Acacia Seeds” is a playful and delightful, if bonkers, read. Quite funny in it’s concept and execution, the story also looks on its subjects (including human arrogance in the face of the natural world) with an sincerity that I found quite endearing. As a conceptual sci-fi world-building exercise-to create a world, populate it with unknown sciences, create academics who study the matter, and excerpt their academic articles- “Acacia Seeds” is inspired. As a humorous short story about Ant Scriptures and Penguin poetry, it’s hilarious.

Schrödinger’s Cat.

“Where is the cat?” He asked at last.
“Where is the box?”
“Here.”
“Where’s here?”
“Here is now.”
“We used to think so.”

Compared to “The Author of the Acacia Seeds,” “Schrödinger’s Cat” looks like a kid’s stuff, honestly. “Small Change” had winding halls inside its story, “Acacia Seeds” had no story. “Schrödinger’s Cat” is a story with winding halls circling no story at all. Like a Borges piece but with talking dogs.

In Schrödinger’s Cat a story is being told about something (societal collapse, perhaps?) when the narrator is interrupted by finding a cat. Literally (“A cat has arrived. Interrupting my narrative.”). With attention now focused on the cat, a delivery dog arrives at the house with a package. This dog quickly recognizes the cat, which is, famously, Schrödinger’s Cat. This is perfect, it turns out, because this dog just happened to deliver a box and gun which allows the dog and human, after explanation of who Erwin Schrödinger was, what Quantum Physics is, and some waxing on the complexities of certainty, to actually perform the famous thought experiment of the same name: Schrödinger’s Cat.

The story is designed as a story in a story in a box. It consists of a very short piece of fiction, written by the writer Ursula K Le Guin. That story is interrupted by the narrator’s story, which is then, again, interrupted by the cat’s appearance. Once all the pieces happen into the same space, the dog demands the soothing certainty of putting the cat in the box to see what happens. Whatever happens after, putting the cat into the box is what matters. All the box talk reminds Le Guin’s narrator of the story of Pandora’s Box, which seems relevant but the meaning of which she cannot recall at the moment.

The story is one about certainty. “All I want is certainty,” the dog says, “to know for sure that God does play dice with the world.” So, eventually, the cat is in the box, and the question is at hand: alive or not alive? Once the box is opened they find the cat is not alive or dead, but rather has disappeared. Then, the dog “does not flinch even when the roof of the house was lifted off just like the lid of a box.”

If you wanted to write a story about Quantum Physics this is basically as well as you could go about it.

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