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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Joseph Olander and Martin Greenberg, eds. , Ursula K. Le Guin, Taplinger Publishing, 1979, 239 pps. The tribes of Kesh, a country in what is now California, live a fairly rustic existence, but they have access to a variety of technological apparatuses. One apparatus, an interplanetary computer called The Exchange, provides information to anyone who knows its programming language, TOK. Additionally, the tribes have battery-powered flashlights and motorized boats, and tribal supplies are carried by train from town to town.

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. Kroeber, Theodora (1963). The Inland Whale. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. p.10.

Dirty Old Man: Pandora describes old Kesh men showing off for one another by dancing the Moon (an annual orgy festival). Always Coming Home, was published in 1985 with an accompanying cassette tape on which we can hear the music, poetry and soundscapes of the Kesh. Le Guin asked her friend and composer Todd Barton to help turn her musical intuitions into compositions—“I began wanting to hear the music. I got a real yearning to hear the literature. I could hear the words, but I couldn’t hear the music. So I asked a composer friend, whom I had come to know and respect, ‘Would you write the music for a non-existent people?’”. It begins wonderfully: “The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California”. Time-twisting from the start, Le Guin plays with the idea of then (before) and now and then (to come), and tells us something marvellous about this game of life: “What was and what may be lie, like children whose faces we cannot see, in the arms of silence. All we ever have is here, now”.

Compares how fantasy has changed from absolute imagination like "Aladdin's Magic Lamp" to more reality based Utopias in the fiction of William Morris, Frank Balm, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Ursula Le Guin. Crossley suggests this is a development that shows a maturity in American literature. Conlang: The language of Kesh has a considerable vocabulary given. The expanded edition also adds the syntax rules.

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Explores how various twentieth-century women writers have used nature as a literary device. Murphy then compares these ideas to the literary theories of Mikhail M. Bakhtin. Rape as Drama: The Miller raping a woman (a case of incest) is treated as one. Not so much in other cases described: both Stone Telling and Shamsha fell pregnant from a rape, and Shamsha didn't even see it as something serious enough to tell others, nor saw a reason to abort the child. The Rape, Pillage, and Burn actions of the Dayao, on the other hand, aren't taken lightly.