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W. R. Irwin, "From Fancy to Fantasy: Coleridge and Beyond," in The Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and Art, edited by Roger Schlobin, University of Notre Dame Press, 1982, pp. 36-55. Since Always Coming Home does not follow a traditional novel format, the point of view shifts continually. Both Pandora and Stone Telling's parts are told in first person, but these two sections make up less than half of the novel. Le Guin uses the framework of a scientific text to explore how a culture makes meaning, both for itself and for other cultures around it. Praised by some as lyrical and inventive, Le Guin's shifting between different "artifacts" makes following a single story, such as Stone Telling's narrative, difficult and, at times, frustrating. However, the intermixture of poems, songs, short narratives, religious ceremonies, and news bulletins help make sense of what Stone Telling says and what she leaves out. The nonfiction aspects of this novel also help make it seem more plausible and real, lending a depth to otherwise shallow characters. Post-Apocalyptic Dog: A frequent trouble in the Valley. Ironically, domesticated dogs mainly serve the purpose of protecting against those. No child ever goes into the forest without at least one.
A discussion of a selection of the novels used as texts in a course on language and science fiction taught by Hardman at the University of Florida. Novels included works by Nalo Hopkinson, Ursula Le Guin, and Elizabeth Moon. The relevance of each novel to the subject matter is included with its bibliographical citation.
Always Coming Home allows Le Guin to question not only her craft, but contemporary notions of progress. Le Guin pits the Kesh, who do not use technology and are successful, against the Condors, who insist on using technology and ultimately fail. Le Guin maintains throughout this novel that technology without a connection to the universe is meaningless. The Condors fail to produce a massive killing machine because the technology saturated culture necessary for such a machine does not exist. The Kesh succeed because they have put technology in balance with nature, making real progress.
Unnamed Performers. “Papago: Girl’s Initiation Ceremony”. Indian Music of the Southwest. Folkways Records, 1957. Crow explores how descriptions of California differ in the works of John Griffith London, William Callenbach, and Ursula Le Guin. Suggests that in the different Utopias all see California as the ideal location.California Collapse: Not quite a collapse, but a lot of today's structures are visible under the water, and it appears that Northern California has flooded. 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. Francis Molson, "Ethical Fantasy for Children," in The Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and Art, edited by Roger Schlobin, University of Notre Dame Press, 1982, pp .82-104. The names in Le Guin's novel are descriptive because they not only name the characters, but they also describe the characters' personalities or circumstances in life. Pandora, for example, is the scientist who puts the entire collection of artifacts from the Kesh society together. However, Pandora was also the name of the first woman, according to Greek legend, who released all the evil in the world. The name, Pandora, also means "gift." Pandora, the editor in Always Coming Home, is keenly aware of the historical significance of her name. The names of both the Kesh and Condor characters are metaphoric as well. Pandora admits near the end of the novel that she has been using the English "meanings" of the Keshian and Condorian names rather than their real spellings Le Guin does this for two reasons: one, she wants her readers to connect with her characters; and two, she wants her characters' names to reflect what her characters do. Kroeber, Theodora (1963). The Inland Whale. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. p.10.
Your Favorite Book: Always Coming Home with Shruti Swamy” by Malavika Praseed, Chicago Review of Books (9 September 2021) Like much of Le Guin's work, Always Coming Home follows Native American themes. According to Richard Erlich, [8] " Always Coming Home is a fictional retelling of much in A. L. Kroeber's [Ursula's father] monumental Handbook of the Indians of California." There are also some elements retrieved from her mother's The Inland Whale ( Traditional narratives of Native California), such as the importance of the number nine, and the map of the Na Valley which looks like the Ancient Yurok World. [9] There are also Taoist themes: the heyiya-if looks like the taijitu, and its hollow center (the "hinge") is like the hub of the wheel as described in the Tao Te Ching. Le Guin had described herself "as an unconsistent Taoist and a consistent un-Christian". [10] Mistaken for Gay: That was one of the possibilities discussed by the Valley people when they saw the Dayao army — for them, it was unimaginable that such a large group of people would contain no women. In "the Miller", the titular character jumps into his mill's machinery once he realizes what he did.
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Crazy Cultural Comparison: A lot of the aspects of the Kesh culture are alien to us, most prominently their attitude to property and wealth. When Stone Telling describes the Condor people, with customs closer to a western society (a highly conservative one), she treats them as madmen. Mutual Kill: The evening stories about the Coyote and the humans have the war general's sons kill each other. Though Native American literature is an inspiration for Always Coming Home, Le Guin was conscious of the moral implications of using real people’s stories, especially when these have been forcefully written out of Western history. The silence around Native American histories, the inaccessibility of their songs and words, the fact that she was “much better at making things up than at remembering them” influenced the creation and development of Kesh civilization in this fictional ethnography of her native yet future Northern California. The novel’s title reveals how in this simultaneous act of getting close whilst distancing herself, Le Guin was able to metaphorically “come home”. Interrupted Intimacy: Stone Telling describes how she traveled to another town in her childhood. Her cousins there tended to have fun at night by interrupting amorous teens. Pixieltd on Reading The Wheel of Time: Taim Tells Lies and Rand Shares His Plan in Winter’s Heart (Part 3) 8 hours ago
Our Mermaids Are Different: "Shahugoten" tells the story of a girl who was born part fish and tended to fluctuate in that regard. 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. The Kesh use technological inventions of civilization such as writing, steel, guns, electricity, trains, and a computer network (see below). However, unlike one of their neighboring societies – the Dayao or Condor People – they do nothing on an industrial scale, reject governance, have no non-laboring caste, do not expand their population or territory, consider disbelief in what we consider “supernatural” absurd, and deplore human domination of the natural environment. Their culture blends millennia of human economic culture by combining aspects of hunter-gatherer, agricultural, and industrial societies, but rejects cities (literal “ civilization”). In fact, what they call “towns” would count as villages for the reader – a dozen or a few-dozen multi-family or large family homes. What they call “war” is a minor skirmish over hunting territories, and is considered a ridiculous pastime for youngsters, since an adult person should not throw his life away. Author Avatar: While she never appears, Pandora mentions that she got much of her information from a Kesh woman called Little Bear Woman, which is an English translation of the Latin name "Ursula".
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.
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