Always Coming Home (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

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Just as her science fiction classic The Left Hand of Darkness envisioned a world in which gender and sexuality were fluid, so Always Coming Home imagines a world in which its human people — highly sophisticated and technological in many ways — dance their world and tread on it lightly. It is a world in which women and men dance together as equals and animals are the other people who live in this valley.

Significant Wardrobe Shift: A person starts wearing proper clothing (instead of just covering the essentials) at puberty, and dyed clothing upon taking on a sexual partner. Always Coming Home is a 1985 Pastoral Science Fiction novel by Ursula K. Le Guin describing an After the End future. In her creative process for the novel, she created a map for the imaginary valley in which the Kesh lived —“First you dream, then you map the dream”. She played around with the idea of it being similar to Telluride (a county in Colorado) but in South America, high up in the Andes, until it finally dawned upon her that it was the Napa valley of “Kishamish” where the story needed to take place. Compares the narrative techniques and Utopian ideologies in novels by Doris Lessing and Ursula Le Guin. Le Guin's novel challenges the basic concept of scientific observation. She argues that a scientist cannot write outside of her culture and, therefore, must forget claims of objectivity. We see the Kesh and the Condors not as they are, but how Pandora sees them. This is the hypocrisy that Le Guin challenges: the late twentieth century idea that science is not influenced by human behavior.One Dialogue, Two Conversations: The conversations between Willow and Terter Abhao often come out as that, due to their different views on both property and behavior (plus Terter's poor grasp of the Kesh language). Deliberate Values Dissonance: Kesh attitudes to sex, property and gender are considerably different from ours (wealth, for example, is determined by generosity instead of property). Stone Telling recounts how she spent her childhood with her mother's people in the Valley, as a very young woman lived several years with her father's people in The City, and escaped from it with her daughter, who was born there. The two societies are contrasted through her narrative: the Kesh are peaceable and self-organized, whereas the Condor people of The City are rigid, patriarchal, hierarchical, militaristic, and expansionist. I Owe You My Life: Inverted in the Valley, at least with medicine. A doctor who saves a person's life is considered to be the one in debt, being akin to a parent now. One doctor was forced to swap towns due to all the debts in the old place. In the new one, he concentrated on animals and terminal patients. Forbidden Love: Relationships between people in any one of the Five Houses are taboo and treated as incest, even absent any familial connection. Le Guin describes this by analogy to moiety kinship systems in various real-life cultures.

Royal Blood: It is stated that when the Condor's son was to be executed, no one dared to raise a hand against him. Instead, they gave him the chair and said it was electricity that killed him.Cosy Catastrophe: Despite all the past and residual damage to Earth, people seem to be quite happy (except for the Dayao). War Is Hell: For Kesh, war is idiocy, at least on the scale they are familiar with it (a dozen people fighting another tribe over some offense). Stone Telling, however, who had lived with the warlike Dayao, has learned and describes the horrors of war in detail. Pandora observes that a key difference between the Kesh and the readers' [her?] society is the size of their population: "There are not too many of them.". [2] Their low population density means that they can feed themselves from their land. The Kesh maintain this low population without coercion, which would be antithetical to their loosely organized society. They carry a large accumulation of genetic damage, which leads to fewer successful pregnancies and higher infant mortality. They also have social taboos against multiple siblings and early pregnancies; a third child is considered shameful, and the Dayao's practice of large families is referred to as "incontinence". Abortions are practiced freely.

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.The book might seem to be something other than or more than a novel. Although billed as such, it, more than other Le Guin science fiction, stands somewhere between genres. It is not “philosophical fiction” or “anthropological fiction”—or rather, it is an example of both and neither. It refuses categories, embraces all, philosophizes and practices philosophy at the same time that it tells a story, makes up characters, describes a society. It is a complete ethnography; at the same time that the reader knows that the Kesh do not exist, he knows their existence more completely than any group studied in cultural anthropology. Le Guin, like other practitioners of speculative fiction or philosophy-fiction, believes in the potentiality of fiction for the discovery of cognitive and ethical truths. She uses the form and structure of her work, as well as its content, to pose problems of truth, knowledge, and value, and the form of the work itself proffers a solution. Midway through her career, Le Guin embarked on one of her most detailed, impressive literary projects, a novel that took more than five years to complete. Blending story and fable, poetry, artwork, and song, Always Coming Home is this legendary writer’s fictional ethnography of the Kesh, a people of the far future living in a post-apocalyptic Napa Valley.