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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Discusses the change in imaginary writing from Coleridge to modern writers. Suggests that Coleridge changed the meaning of "imagination" and so opened the doors to fantasy literature. In the Local Tongue: One of the recorded Kesh songs sounds quite mystical and impressive, fitting with others in the album. Translated into English, it is the singers quite explicitly propositioning someone for sex. In the mid-80s, in the UK, the post war consensus was falling apart. The 1984 Miner’s Strike; the Falklands War; the Greenham Common peace camp; the film, Where The Wind Blows — all these and others just highlighted the divisions that were growing in our communities and there was a slowly emerging awareness that the direction of travel of carbon-fuelled, military obsessed Western capitalism was the wrong one — a truth only accentuated further in retrospect by the desperate death-throes of the ruthlessly targeted mining communities. Margaret Thatcher’s famous phrase, “There Is No Alternative”, just brought home to many of us that there just had to be a different way. Dirty Old Man: Pandora describes old Kesh men showing off for one another by dancing the Moon (an annual orgy festival).

Raymond Thompson, "Modern Fantasy and Medieval Romance: A Comparative Study," in The Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and Art, edited by Roger Schlobin, University of Notre Dame Press, 1982, pp. 211-25.The poem functions as the Hope of Pandora’s box. Pandora, in classical mythology, was a beautiful mortal endowed by Zeus with insatiable curiosity and told not to open the box given her, which, she soon learned, contained all the world’s evils. She looses these horrors of war, famine, pestilence, and greed, only managing to retain Hope at the bottom. Le Guin’s Pandora, too, feels responsible for the Hitlers, the atom bombs, the dead babies, but like that first Pandora, “giver of All,” Le Guin’s Pandora keeps Hope. This final poem connecting the Kesh to the present can, therefore, be viewed as Pandora’s Hope, Le Guin’s gift to a despairing world. 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. In some ways, this book seems to represent a major departure in the fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin, whose many works of science fiction and fantasy have established her as one of the major contemporary writers in those genres. Unlike most of her earlier works, ALWAYS COMING HOME is not set on a distant planet or in an enchanted land, nor are there exotic aliens or wizards featured in her cast of characters. Ditching the Dub Names: In most of the book, the Kesh people's meaningful names are translated into English. At a few points, Le Guin broke with her own convention to show the reader what the names were supposed to actually sound like.

I never did like smart-ass utopians’—On Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin” by Mazin Saleem, Strange Horizons (26 November 2018) One poem has a story of a man whose penis was tired of constantly being forced to work, so it cut itself off and ran away. Worldbuilding: A very thorough example. There are maps of both the Na Valley and a good portion of the rest of America, there are songs, poetry, folklore. Even food recipes.

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Together in Death: The Wedding Night at Chukulmas has a wedding ceremony note Proper weddings are only conducted on a particular day of the year in the Valley. joined by the ghosts of a man and a woman who died before they could get married. In the end, it is agreed the formal ceremony can, in fact, be performed for them. Reading Always Coming Home for the first time was when my imagination started to grow up. I got lost in it just as I always did with books, but this time there was something different. Here was a weaving — something deeply prophetic, powerful and poetic. Here was a vision that spoke to a part of me — lets call it my ecological self — that had been dormant for so long (the young child is always alive to the ecological self — but that is another story). And here was a grown up, strange and difficult book that expects a lot of its readers, but gives gift upon gift each time it is opened. Since Always Coming Home does not follow a traditional novel format, the point of view shifts continually. Both Pandora and Stone Telling's parts are told in first person, but these two sections make up less than half of the novel. Le Guin uses the framework of a scientific text to explore how a culture makes meaning, both for itself and for other cultures around it. Praised by some as lyrical and inventive, Le Guin's shifting between different "artifacts" makes following a single story, such as Stone Telling's narrative, difficult and, at times, frustrating. However, the intermixture of poems, songs, short narratives, religious ceremonies, and news bulletins help make sense of what Stone Telling says and what she leaves out. The nonfiction aspects of this novel also help make it seem more plausible and real, lending a depth to otherwise shallow characters. 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.