Always Coming Home

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Always Coming Home
First edition cover
Author(s)	Ursula K. Le Guin
Illustrator	Margaret Chodos
Language	English
Subject(s)	California — Fiction
Genre(s)	Science Fiction
Publisher	Harper and Row
Publication date	1985
Media type	Print (hardcover and paperback)
Pages	523 pp
ISBN	ISBN 0-06-015545-0
OCLC Number	11728313
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 19
LC Classification	PS3562.E42 A79 1985

Always Coming Home is a novel by author Ursula K. Le Guin, published in 1985, about a cultural group of humans—the Kesh—who "might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California." (p. i) Part novel, part textbook, part anthropologist's record, Always Coming Home explains the life and culture of the Kesh people.^[1]

Plot Introduction

The book weaves around the story of a Kesh woman called Stone Telling, who lived for years with her father's people—the Dayao or Condor people, whose society is rigid, patriarchal, hierarchical and militarily expansionist. The story fills less than a third of the book, with the rest being a mixture of Kesh cultural lore (including poetry, prose of various kinds, mythos, rituals, and recipes), essays on Kesh culture, and the musings of the narrator, "Pandora". Some editions of the book were accompanied by a tape of Kesh music and poetry.

Pandora describes the book as a protest against contemporary civilization, which the Kesh call "the Sickness of Man". Pandora muses that one key difference is that the Kesh have solved the problem of overpopulation—there are many fewer of them than there are of us. They use such inventions of civilization as writing, steel, guns, electricity, trains, and a computer network (see below). However, unlike most neighboring societies, they reject government, a non-laboring caste, expansion of population or territory, disbelief in what we consider supernatural, and human domination of the natural environment. They blend millennia of human economic culture by combining aspects of hunter-gatherer, agriculture, and industry, but reject cities; indeed, what they call towns would count as villages now.

Awards

The novel received the Kafka Prize in 1985, In addition, it was named a runner up by the National Book Awards in 1985.^[2][3]

Literary significance and criticism

It has been noted that Always Coming Home underscores Le Guin's long-standing anthropological interests. The Valley of Na is modeled on the landscape of California's Napa Valley, where Ursula Le Guin grew up as a child.^[4]

Like much of Le Guin's work, Always Coming Home follows Native American and Taoist themes.^{[citation needed]} It is set in a time so post-apocalyptic that no cultural source can remember the apocalypse, though a few folk tales refer to our time. The only signs of our civilisation that have lasted into their time are artifacts such as styrofoam and a self-manufacturing, self-maintaining, solar-system-wide computer network.

Stone Telling's narrative may be seen as a return to the theme of The Dispossessed and The Eye of the Heron, in which a person from an anarchistic society visits an acquisitive government-ruled society and returns.^{[citation needed]}

Box set and soundtrack

A box set edition of the book (ISBN 0-06-015456-X), comes with an audiocassette entitled Music and Poetry of the Kesh, featuring 10 musical pieces and 3 poetry performances by Todd Barton. The book contains 100 original illustrations by Margaret Chodos.

Stage performance

A stage version of Always Coming Home was mounted at Naropa University in 1993 (with Le Guin's approval) by Ruth Davis-Fyer. Music for the production was composed and directed by Brian Mac Ian, although it was original music and not directly influenced by Todd Barton's work.

Publication history

• Original trade release (with cassette) 1985 ISBN 0-06-015545-0
• Mass-market Bantam Spectra paperback 1986 ISBN 0-553-26280-7
• Trade paperback from the University of California press 2001 ISBN 0-520-22735-2 (as part of a series of literature pieces set in California) - the book had been out of print for many years when this was released.

Translations

• Russian: "Всегда возвращаясь домой", Eksmo, 2005
• Polish: "Wracać wciąż do domu", Prószyński, 1996
• Serbian: "Stalno se vraćajući kući", Polaris, 1992
• Italian: "Sempre la valle", Mondadori, 1986

References

Notes

Bibliography

External links

• Review of the SF of Ursula K. Le Guin
• Review by Danny Yee
• History of an Imagined World Always Coming Home
• Official author book site