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dgruver3, December 4, 2006 (view all comments by dgruver3)
One of my favorite in the not-the-usual-story category is Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home. Her language, as always, is elegant and seems sparing while evoking entire worlds as I am reading. But the book is unusual: many different kinds of materials are contained between the covers:

legends
cosmologies,
recipes,
theatrical scripts,
music and instrumentation (listen to their instruments on the tape, see drawings in the book),
maps,
metaphysical diagrams,
stories told round the campfire,
histories
old poems,
several excerpts from larger works,
sayings commonly used
life stories offered to the village library
angst-ridden asides by the "author" and ethnographer, Pandora, and
one novel, a life story, broken into three chapters spread through the book

It's kind of like paging through an ethnographer's notebooks and files.

The focus of the story is a village society several thousand years in the future, in the mountains west of California's central valley, which is now a vast inland sea. The nine towns along the Na River share a culture, and the ethnographer is presenting things for us to read and learn about that culture. In the process, we learn about some other neighboring cultures too. The central novel of the book is about a woman whose heritage is half the people of the Valley, and the other half a very different people from the "Volcano Country" around Mount Shasta. She travels between her cultures, a story covering several decades, and we see her two cultures compared largely through her eyes.

It is not an anti-technology book, but technology is happening on a much more low-key level in Le Guin's invented future. It is sort of a post-technological-holocaust book, but people are not living in the ruins of cities, or dealing with the immediate aftermath in any way. Still, they are affected by quite a bit of toxic waste left from what is probably our era or just after it -- waste lives on in the groundwater and soil, and in the genetics of the humans and many other animals. And they are affected in another way: being wary of unneeded technology or wealth.

The peoples and the cultures in Le Guin's book are believable, acting like people do regardless of the particular society, living out their daily lives of tasks and children and housework and cooking, mixed with a deep spiritual relationship to the world, enacted through daily and seasonal rituals. They are a likeable people, not heroic necessarily, but they have good perseverance, and good ethics. Le Guin takes us to the Valley of the Na by allowing us to look at it through them many formats - stories, scripts, drawings, and so on - just as real people in real cultures do.

This is one of the most interesting constructions of a work of fiction I've ever come across. In addition, it is an interesting view of how humans might adapt our culture in the future, without being utopian or too idealistic. Plus, many interesting stories and ideas.

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Product Details

ISBN:

9780060154561

Author:

Le Guin, Ursula K

Publisher:

Harper & Row

Location:

New York :

Subject:

California

Subject:

Fantastic fiction

Copyright:

1985

Edition Number:

1st ed.

Series Volume:

no. 20

Publication Date:

c1985

Binding:

SLIPCASE

Illustrations:

Yes

Pages:

523 p.

Dimensions:

24 cm. +