Ursula K. Le Guin: Always Coming Home (Loa #315): Author's Expanded Edition: 4 (Library of America Ursula K. Le Guin Edition)

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Although Always Coming Home is innovative, there are connections between it and Le Guin's earlier work. She had begun to interpolate mythic and historical material into her narratives in both The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and the Earthsea trilogy. She has also interwoven material from her knowledge of North American Indians in earlier works. Her idealized cultures, including the dream world in The Word For World Is Forest (1976) as well as the Earthsea trilogy, are pastoral, nontechnological societies. The Indian way of life is also depicted in the post catastrophic image of the western United States in City of Illusions (1967). The Valley People live in a virtual utopia, holding sacred seasonal ceremonies and exis Mistaken for Pregnant: In "Dangerous People", Shamsha considers some action by Hwette to be a sign she is pregnant, but Hwette denies any such thing.

Oliver Scheiding, "An Archeology of the Future Postmodern Strategies of Boundary Transitions in Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home," American Studies, Vol. 41, No. 4, 1996, pp. 637-56. Discusses the change in imaginary writing from Coleridge to modern writers. Suggests that Coleridge changed the meaning of "imagination" and so opened the doors to fantasy literature. From Cataclysm to Myth: The Kesh are aware the world has been damaged by the actions of past humans, but aren't exactly interested in knowing more. Artificial Intelligence: The Exchange is operated by a solar-system-spanning network of AIs that otherwise exist entirely separately from humans.Patricia Linton, "The 'Person' in Postmodern Fiction: Gibson, Le Guin, and Vizenor," Studies in American Indian Literatures, Fall, 1993, pp. 3-11. Perfect Pacifist People: Subverted. The Kesh war, but only the teenagers, and adults consider war to be immature and foolish. They still have incidents of interpersonal violence. Creation Myth: A few are told by people in the book. It is unclear how much of it is tradition and how much is made up on the spot. Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Stone Telling describes how, when the Dayao start suffering defeats and food shortages, a lot of their commoners start running away. She follows soon.

Prophetic Fallacy: Stone Telling has a vision at one point of her father's corpse. When he shows up later, she believes her vision to be false, but later, when he helps her escape the Dayao people, she realizes it must have been a vision of the future.Good Girls Avoid Abortion: The Dayao nobles would never consider an abortion, but the commoners are stated to have them more often than not. Definitely averted for the Kesh people, who are a complete pro-choice society (except for girls younger than eighteen, who are never allowed to become mothers). Stone Telling mentions having an abortion after a case of Marital Rape License by her Dayao husband. The Scapegoat: A lot of people among the Dayao once their ruler's policy of trying to take on the entire continent at once was shown not to go as smoothly as expected. After all, there was no way their divine Glorious Leader was at fault. Hiding Behind the Language Barrier: In "The Trouble with the Cotton People", the traders bringing cotton to the valley claim their captain is the only person capable of speaking the language of the Cotton People, and speaks no other. They are all Cotton People. The "captain" is some mentally challenged guy they found who cannot speak properly at all. Le Guin is always circumspect, but the Kesh are grounded in specifics. The Valley of the book is the Napa Valley; the Na River is the Napa River. It is an important wine-growing region, located just north of San Francisco Bay. The story is set far in the future, and readers are given hints of some kind of holocaust that has taken place; areas made unlivable by radioactivity, many genetic defects in humans and animals (born sevai), cities on the coast now underwater. It is likely that with the Greenhouse Effect, or a nuclear explosion, the atmosphere has heated up, melting the polar ice cap and raising the level of the oceans, thus flooding coastal cities, California’s Central Valley, and the low desert area east of the Sierra Nevada. San Francisco Bay has become huge, “the Inland Sea,” and the Coastal Range a long peninsula. These details, though, are not in the book and, in a way, are totally peripheral to the Kesh and their story. In 1985 in Ursula’s home in the Napa Valley, Elinor Armer and Ursula K. Le Guin dreamt up an archipelago of islands – the Islands of the Uttermost Parts – where music was used for purposes beyond listening and was even more essential than it is in our world. Le Guin wrote the words describing each island and Elinor scored them; both drew maps and spoke the poems. The musical excerpt used in the programme describes the island The Pheromones, where “music is sex (scored only)” and we can hear Ursula describe the island The Antioriental Shores, where “music is shadow (spoken only)”.

The society is not based on profit but on giving. Someone is considered rich who gives much; someone is poor if he is miserly. This ethic defines the society, informing many stories and the language itself. People do not own the land but have its use for their families, giving any surplus to a common storehouse. A creation such as a story or a poem is not completed until it is given—recited and performed for the whole community. My God, What Have I Done?: In "The Miller", the titular character, after raping a woman he was obsessed with (an incestuous relationship, to boot), jumps into his watermill's wheel. Le Guin, Ursula K.; Barton, Todd; Chodos-Irvine, Margaret; Hersh, George (27 February 2001). Always Coming Home (2001ed.). ISBN 9780520227354– via Google Books. John Moore, "An Archaeology of the Future: Ursula Le Guin and Anarcho-Primitivism," Foundation, Spring, 1995, pp. 32-9. Not Quite the Right Thing: This is how the people of the Valley viewed four men who spent a month carrying home four corpses of their friends who died in a poisoned land. Nice, but the effort is excessive.Utopia: Discussed, especially in the Framing Device when Pandora talks with a Kesh woman and complains about how "utopians" are a bother. The Kesh are at least partially In Harmony with Nature, wealth is determined by generosity, homophobia and sexism are minimized, and there is no need for police or an army, but there's also superstition, violence, and cruelty. Awesome, but Impractical: The Dayao attempt to build a few airplanes as a Superweapon Surprise. In the Post-Peak Oil setting, they are forced to resort to biofuel production, and it turns out the whole food production of their city (built in a spot rather bad for agriculture at that) is insufficient to provide enough, even without accounting for, you know, the people's need to eat. Sarah Jo Webb, "Culture as Spiritual Metaphor in Le Guin's Always Coming Home," in Functions of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Thirteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, edited by Joe Sanders, Greenwood, 1995, pp. 155-60.