However believable you find Ursula K. Le Guin’s imagined worlds, you cannot visit the planet Gethen and cross its frozen plains, nor can you join the commune on Anarres or sail the archipelagos of Earthsea. The town of Klatsand, from Searoad, has an address in Oregon, but you can’t drive or fly there. You may, however visit where the Kesh people “might be going to have lived a long, long time from now.” They’ll perhaps live in Northern California, in the Napa Valley, and one of their towns might sit where the Le Guin family had a summer house. In Always Coming Home, her longest and strangest novel, just reissued by the Library of America, Ursula K. Le Guin built a utopia in her backyard.
A warning: If you read solely for plot, Always Coming Home might seem an exercise in Never Reaching the Point, and I’d encourage you to read The Lathe of Heaven or a volume of Earthsea in its stead. This novel represents a culmination of the anthropological or societal bent in Le Guin’s fiction. Le Guin’s first three novels were republished as Worlds of Exile and Illusion—worlds, not tales or stories. The Left Hand of Darkness alternates plot chapters with bits of Winter’s lore and excerpts of its stories; while The Dispossessed, “An Ambiguous Utopia,” announces its social interests in its very subtitle. Always Coming Home doesn’t abandon narrative, but it comes close: This is a book that aspires to placehood.
The table of contents for this book is several pages long; the sundry “scholarly” materials, notes on culture, and excerpts from literature that might comprise the Appendices to unusually detailed doorstop fantasy novels are here the core of the text. In an introduction to Gollancz’s UK edition (which does not include the expanded material in the Library of America edition), John Scalzi describes his initial immersion into Kesh life and how he didn’t read the book straight through, but read snippets at random. Plodding stickler that I am, I read the book cover to cover, but I’m not sure that was the right decision. This is a book, after all, that announces on page 59 that an interrupted story will resume on page 208; a book in which the author announces on the first page that some of the more “explanatory, descriptive pieces” have been relegated to “The Back of the Book, where those who want narrative can ignore them and those who enjoy explanations can find them.” Then again, there’s something to be said for reading straight through to appreciate the novelist’s art. Take the segment “Time and the City” as an example: Read at its appointed place a third of the way through the book, it left this reader reeling.
The interrupted story which resumes 150 pages later—the autobiography of a woman named Stone Telling—provides most of the incident and a third of the length of Always Coming Home. “Stone Telling” is the most novelistic portion of the book, and therefore perhaps the least characteristic. The novel’s remainder is an anthropologist’s “carrier bag”: creation myths, campfire stories, a portion of a Kesh novel, oral histories, dirty jokes, transcripts of plays, a few dozen plays, maps of the Na Valley and environs, reports of travels, brief life stories, a dictionary, and more. An unlikely form supports an unusual function: The Kesh structure their towns as hinges and gyres, and a straightforward narrative would hinder the reader’s understanding of this society. Cycles and continua matter more than beginnings and endings; Le Guin’s mode is ethnography, not epic.
Le Guin didn’t write about Kesh culture; she created it and presents it to her readers, with the relevant glosses, much as her anthropologist parents presented the Native American cultures they studied. Indeed, though they’re inhabitants of a post-post-apocalyptic future, some Kesh beliefs and traditions resemble those of various Native American nations. In essays included in this expanded edition, Le Guin writes of the pains she took to make the Kesh their own culture—she had no intention of transplanting an existing society into The Future, changing a few names, blurring a few details, and announcing her great invention—and of the scrupulousness with which she avoided what, thirty-odd years after the book’s initial publication, we’d label cultural appropriation. Anyone with dreams of worldbuilding should read these essays.
Not only does she avoid rote duplication of real cultures, Le Guin pulls off the trick of making the Kesh believable even as she reminds the reader of their artificiality. The novel opens with the author, who refers to herself as Pandora, reflecting on the challenges of imagining the people who “might be going to have lived” in her backyard. Pandora pops up at intervals throughout the book, flitting between here-and-now and then-and-there: She sits in on a Kesh dance/play; she tape records an interview; she reflects on nature and time; she doubts, worries, and wonders just what she’s writing.
Few novels resemble Le Guin’s survey of the Kesh, though a few comparisons come to mind. In the early 2000s, Le Guin translated Argentinian writer Angélica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial, polyphonic stories of a fabulous empire. In the mid-eighties historian and travel writer Jan Morris published Last Letters from Hav, her only novel, which presents itself as reportage; only the book’s shelving under “fiction” gives the game away. When, three decades on, Morris re-released the book with more material and a shorter title, Le Guin provided the introduction. Jean d’Ormesson’s The Glory of the Empire, first published in the US in 1974, is a magisterial, scrupulous, and utterly false account of a great empire that might have dominated Europe. Milorad Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars didn’t appear until Always Coming Home was a few years old, but it may be the book’s closest relation. Pavic presented his tale, about a vanished tribe in medieval Transylvania, as a dictionary; since lexicographers don’t expect front-to-back reading of their labors, reading Pavic’s novel page by consecutive page was optional.
Buy the Book
Always Coming Home
Always Coming Home hasn’t quite been out of print, but for two decades it’s only been available in a University of California Press paperback. That the academy should publish Le Guin’s hypothetical anthropology is appropriate, as is the Press’s California address, but the limited distribution and the $31.95 sticker price for the softcover have kept it off most bookstore shelves. Printed on the LOA’s standard bible-thin paper, this Author’s Expanded Edition runs two or three hundred pages longer than the novel’s previous publications. Just as their Hainish set came bursting with essays, reflections, and annotation and added a whole fifth Way to the novella collection Four Ways to Forgiveness, the Library of America’s Always Coming Home includes significant new material. For most readers, the highlight will be the full text of Dangerous People, the Kesh novel excerpted in the main body of Always Coming Home. It would be dishonest to call Dangerous People, which runs under fifty pages, “a brand-new novel” by Le Guin, but its inclusion is a welcome surprise. Also included are several essays by Le Guin, the transcript of a panel at a long-ago science fiction convention, endnotes by the volume’s editor, and a detailed chronology of Le Guin’s life. As best I can tell, there’s only one thing not included: Music and Poetry of the Kesh, the album which Le Guin recorded and composed with Todd Barton. Always Coming Home’s original hardback included a cassette; in the streaming era, we get a link to Barton’s Bandcamp.
I don’t think Always Coming Home is Le Guin’s best novel; it is, however, her most novel. I mean that in two senses: It’s her most “novel” for the risks it runs and the demands it makes, and it’s her “most” novel for the number of its pages and the depth of its imagination. Many good books feel like journeys; many bad books, particularly in science fiction, feel like sightseeing tours. This is a good book, but it doesn’t feel like a tour or a journey. It feels like living, like setting down roots, like knowing your neighbors and loving your home. It’s a remarkable book, and there’s been nothing quite like it in the last thirty-five years.
Always Coming Home is available from Library of America.
Matt Keeley reads too much and watches too many movies. You can find him on Twitter at @mattkeeley.
Thanks for this thoughtful essay. Your “warning” passage is very illuminating –though of course it could be easily be maintained that plot was always secondary, or tertiary, to Le Guin.
I have never read this book, and it is high time that I do. It occurs to me that it is a sort of SF Hopscotch, and Julio Cortázar’s is one of my favorite books of all time.
I remember seeing this when it first came out. A big book in a slipcover and a tape of Kesh songs. I had read Roccanon’s World, The Word for World is Forest & The Left Hand of Darkness, so I thought I knew what to expect. Hah!
But it remains my favorite of her works. The Telling and Lavinia come close but can’t beat the beautiful web of what might have been in the far future that as we are all always coming home.
Do you get the music?
I first encountered Le Guin’s writing as a teenager in the ’80s, and I still have my original paperback copy of Always Coming Home, which I have owned for at least a quarter-century, although it has been several years since I last reread it. It is probably my favorite work of hers, although I am fond of The Left Hand of Darkness and the Earthsea books as well.
I am a long-time fan of worldbuilding and descriptions of fictional worlds, (histories, geographies, languages, descriptions of culture and religion, etc.); I realize that this is not for everyone, and there are some elements of the book I might quibble with, but in my case, Always Coming Home was definitely my cup of tea.
@3 I asked about the music, and was told the book doesn’t come with it but it can be downloaded elsewhere at soundcloud.com.
Re: The music: It’s not included, though the title page has a link to the Bandcamp page for the book. If you’d prefer a physical copy, the album has been reissued on vinyl (https://igetrvng.com/ursula-k-le-guin-todd-barton-music-poetry-kesh-2/) and on CD. It’s also on Spotify and likely on other streaming sources too.
One of the most resonant parts of Kesh culture, for me, is their explicit refusal to record certain things. The Winter Carol is sung every year, but it is never written down. The Kesh produce ex tempore poetry and songs as easily as they breathe, but when Little Bear Woman offers to record some for somebody, they find it weird–not wrong, per se, but definitely weird–and IIRC they express relief that Little Bear Woman is going to take the recorded song away with her.
Another bit that’s been knocking around in my head…Little Bear Woman is continually frustrated in her search for histories and prehistories of the Valley. Even with access to the massive database of the City of Mind, which intends to produce a working model of the entire universe, she can’t find anybody human* who understands the questions she’s asking about biostratigraphy and eons and all the rest of it. Cultural origin stories, visions/dreams, and some speculation combine to paint a picture of a civilization that advanced, in our terms, very far indeed, producing the City of Mind or the beginnings of it at some point, but then collapsed. At some point there were a lot of people headed uphill and California appears to have been on fire. At some point the Central Valley collapsed below sea level, or the sea level rose, or both at once. At some point somebody built a holding pond, or something, up in the mountains that has held through the indeterminate number of centuries since anybody remembered what it was for, and it still keeps back a mass of utterly deadly poisoned water despite earthquakes and weathering. But nobody can put any of this in order or even understand the scope and sequence of events between (for example) the settling of Tachas Touchas and the peopling of the Americas.
I found this jarring: if you don’t know where you come from, how can you tell what baggage you are carrying on the road to where you’re going? But on reflection, it’s part of the Kesh worldview, which explicitly rejects Big Questions. In a Kesh play, First Man shouts, “Where did I come from? Why am I here? Answer me! Answer!” and shortly thereafter proves himself to be a monster. The only Big Question that interests the Kesh is, “How can we live in a way that is appropriate to this world in which we find ourselves today, among our fellow living beings?” So they address the prion, or poison, or genetic defect, or whatever it is, that causes sevai by mercy-killing anybody who is born with full-blown symptoms, because assigning the resources needed to stop it happening would require them to stop living in an appropriate manner for the duration, which always means permanently. And they have kept only enough of an explanation for the hardships of their lives to steer them firmly away from courses of action that might lead to a disastrous do-over.
*The City of Mind is a robot civilization that will provide a terminal for access to their database if asked, but otherwise has nothing to do with any humans who appear in Always Coming Home. The Singularity happened and left humanity behind to dig potatoes and sing heya.
Sorry–I keep calling Pandora Little Bear Woman because of a scene in the book where she discusses the literal meaning of her name (Ursula) with a Kesh interviewee/colleague/liaison.
“Ania, apia and alia”, the different kinds of love, come from Austin Tappan Wright’s Islandia, another comparable novel.
An addition in correction of my own post, because I finally checked the actual book: Besides some kind of burning, or at any rate ashy, event (nuclear strike, meteor strike, massive fires due to nobody being available to fight them during the usual fire season, a volcano went off, a combination, a series?) and some type of climatic excursion due to ash or smoke or something (the “dark, cold time” mentioned in the horror story “Dira”) and sea level rise and/or subsidence along the Pacific coast, there is also ocean-front property in Nevada and part of Baja California appears to be underwater. This suggests an absolutely massive subsidence event. The Kesh have access to a database with which they could reconstruct all this. We would; if we realized that the scope of change in the world around us had been much bigger than our stories suggested, we would have debates and scholars would write papers at one another, and eventually there would be TV specials and articles with timelines and artists’ reconstructions, and after that there would be revisions to our textbooks. Just look at the studies and buzz related to the Yellowstone caldera! But the Kesh simply don’t care. Even those Kesh who are most interested in working with the Exchange, which will answer any question put to it, don’t have such historical or scientific questions in their worldview. They are, to the Kesh, the wrong questions. Time isn’t a line at all, they say. It isn’t even a circle. It’s a gyre.