Always Coming Home

Ursula K. Le Guin

★★★★★

Not a novel, not quite a short story/poetry collection, Always Coming Home is a thorough exploration of an imagined post-apocalyptic rural utopia in a far-future Napa Valley.

The book mixes narrative biographies, folk tales, traditional songs, modern songs and poetry, fragments of novels and plays, drawings and maps, all interspersed with scholarly reports on anything from festivals and mythology to architecture, and musings by the anthropologist doing the research and interviews. (“Pandora” as she calls herself is either somehow from our time and society, or from a society more like our own. Which is unimportant, since either way she’s from outside the world as the Kesh would consider it, and knows us well enough to connect to the real audience.)

The Kesh revere spirals, and so it’s fitting that the book isn’t linear, but wrapped around itself and the central story of Stone Telling. Her story is split into three sections: how she met her father (a soldier from a warlike city-state outside the Valley), how she went to live with him, and how she returned home as an adult.

If Left Hand of Darkness is a novel with supporting ethnography, Always Coming Home is an ethnography with a supporting novella.

The interleaving and wrapping around of multiple perspectives provides a fuller picture of Kesh society than a single story could, and it’s arranged so that you gradually build up an understanding embedded within context. It takes time to read and absorb it all, but it’s fascinating.

Music

Le Guin went so far as to work with composer Todd Barton and several more musicians to record some of the songs and poetry…in the Kesh language she constructed, with instruments they invented that could plausibly be manufactured (or in some cases improvised), sometimes with ambient sound or fragments of conversation from the circumstances under which it’s said to have been recorded.

I assumed that would be a lost bit of lore and I’d have to look for used audio cassettes at WorldCon or on eBay or something, but it turns out the book’s current publisher has also released the audio on multiple online platforms. Yes, including Pandora.

Reconnecting

The Kesh way of life is one that reconnects with nature and the land after our industrial age has altered the climate, used up resources, left behind long-lasting pollutants and drowned itself in the rising seas. Villages and towns are sparse, both in the valley and among the neighboring peoples of the inland mountains or the coastal marshes. Wealth isn’t how much you can hoard, but how much you can share. What technology is still available depends partly on what’s left to build it from, partly on what can be built on a small, artisan scale, and partly on what they consider ethical to build.

It’s very much what we’d now call solarpunk.

Outside

As for the rest of the world, it’s mostly left unexplored. Places and peoples are hinted at or mentioned in passing. A mountain range here, a bay there, the occasional place name that suddenly clicks as a shortened form of a name from California today. There’s a trading expedition that crosses “the Gate” and travels along the coast to the south. And there’s Stone Telling’s report on her life among the Condor People, an autocratic nation obsessed with masculinity, violence, domination and conquest, whose obsession with hierarchy and control ultimately undermines their own war effort.

Tech-related spoiler:

I do like the idea of artificial intelligences that have decided they should just do their own thing and not interfere with humanity, because that would screw up their data about humans.

I would have liked to see more, but the intense focus on the Kesh and the Valley of Na means you really understand them by the end…and you also understand just how much you can’t understand about them, because their way of living and thinking is so deeply rooted in a world that doesn’t (yet?) exist for us.