Summary
Ursula Le Guin's Always Coming Home is a major work of the imagination from one of America's most respected writers of science fiction. More than five years in the making, it is a novel unlike any other. A rich and complex interweaving of story and fable, poem, artwork, and music, it totally immerses the reader in the culture of the Kesh, a peaceful people of the far future who inhabit a place called the Valley on the Northern Pacific Coast.
Author Notes
Ursula K. Le Guin was born Ursula Kroeber in Berkeley, California on October 21, 1929. She received a bachelor's degree from Radcliffe College in 1951 and a master's degree in romance literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance from Columbia University in 1952. She won a Fulbright fellowship in 1953 to study in Paris, where she met and married Charles Le Guin.
Her first science-fiction novel, Rocannon's World, was published in 1966. Her other books included the Earthsea series, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, The Lathe of Heaven, Four Ways to Forgiveness, and The Telling. A Wizard of Earthsea received an American Library Association Notable Book citation, a Horn Book Honor List citation, and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1979. She received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014. She also received the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award. She also wrote books of poetry, short stories collections, collections of essays, children's books, a guide for writers, and volumes of translation including the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu and selected poems by Gabriela Mistral. She died on January 22, 2018 at the age of 88.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Ursula K. Le Guin was born Ursula Kroeber in Berkeley, California on October 21, 1929. She received a bachelor's degree from Radcliffe College in 1951 and a master's degree in romance literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance from Columbia University in 1952. She won a Fulbright fellowship in 1953 to study in Paris, where she met and married Charles Le Guin.
Her first science-fiction novel, Rocannon's World, was published in 1966. Her other books included the Earthsea series, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, The Lathe of Heaven, Four Ways to Forgiveness, and The Telling. A Wizard of Earthsea received an American Library Association Notable Book citation, a Horn Book Honor List citation, and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1979. She received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014. She also received the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award. She also wrote books of poetry, short stories collections, collections of essays, children's books, a guide for writers, and volumes of translation including the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu and selected poems by Gabriela Mistral. She died on January 22, 2018 at the age of 88.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) was the author of novels, children's books, short stories, critical writings, and poetry. She was the winner of the National Book Award and the Nebula and Hugo awards for science fiction. She grew up in Berkeley and the Napa Valley and lived in Portland, Oregon.
Kirkus Review
LeGuin here focuses her inimitable world-building skills on two conflicting societies of the future--implying, of course, their relevance to the present. Far less preachy than 1974's The Dispossessed, this is equally intelligent and ambitious. It lacks, however, the flawless integration of storyline and interspersed folk-material that characterized 1969's The Left Hand of Darkness. The novel is set in northern California in some far distant future that has been shaped by earthquakes and social upheaval. There are computers and contraceptives, tanks and antibiotics, but this is a world governed by human customs, not by technological ""progress."" The two societies LeGuin describes are both tribal, though she prevents us from thinking of either as ""primitive."" As in Shevek's role as mediator between the planets Urres and Anarres in The Dispossessed, the two cultures in conflict here are observed by a narrator not wholly part of either world. ""North Owl"" (one of LeGuin's rare female protagonists) is a ""half-person""--raised by a woman of the matriarchal Valley (a herdsmen/farmer tribe), but fathered by a passing Condor warrior. She grows up without a father in her mother's nature-respecting world; later, in her rebellious adolescence, she joins her father and becomes a woman of the war-seeking Condors, marrying, and bearing a child. Ultimately, assuming the new name of ""Woman Coming Home,"" she travels with her own small daughter back to The Valley, as the precarious, war-centered economy of the Condors begins to collapse, taking tribal solidarity along with it. Because LeGuin is adapting relatively familiar (American Indian) paradigms, there are fewer sheer triumphs of wit and imagination than in such science-fiction novels as Left Hand of Darkness, which have offered the geography, customs and languages of entirely invented worlds. In addition, the bulky apparatus of poems, folk tales, maps, illustrations, glossary--even a taped cassette of ""Valley"" music (unavailable for review, but not performed, at any rate, by Moon Unit Zappa)--often overwhelms what should be central here: the delicate, beautifully told story of North Owl's education. Still, the heroine's efforts to strike a balance between opposing claims (between mother and father, spirit and mind, husbandry and conquest, peace and war) mark a return by LeGuin to the themes and techniques of her major work. And no one does this type of utopian near-allegory better. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Envisioning a possible future (and attacking present folly), Le Guin reinvents a ``primitive'' past. The autobiography of a woman of the Kesh, living in the Napa Valley in a distant post-Industrial age, occupies 100 pages. The rest of the book (and a cassette) provide documentation of Kesh spiritual and material culture, from kinship and language to arts and philosophy. Dancing their oneness with nature, valuing cooperation over competition, the Kesh survive contact with the hieratic, war-making, death-dealing Condors, who are a lot like us. If it's hard to believe in a people who use computers and electricity but plow with oxen and see wealth as giving, that's part of the point. The narrative is interrupted by poems, tales, and ``data,'' which demand patient pondering--something Le Guin's many admirers are certain to provide. However, the considerable pleasures of this book are not the pleasures of the novel. Patrica Dooley, formerly with English Dept., Drexel Univ., Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
LeGuin here focuses her inimitable world-building skills on two conflicting societies of the future--implying, of course, their relevance to the present. Far less preachy than 1974's The Dispossessed, this is equally intelligent and ambitious. It lacks, however, the flawless integration of storyline and interspersed folk-material that characterized 1969's The Left Hand of Darkness. The novel is set in northern California in some far distant future that has been shaped by earthquakes and social upheaval. There are computers and contraceptives, tanks and antibiotics, but this is a world governed by human customs, not by technological ""progress."" The two societies LeGuin describes are both tribal, though she prevents us from thinking of either as ""primitive."" As in Shevek's role as mediator between the planets Urres and Anarres in The Dispossessed, the two cultures in conflict here are observed by a narrator not wholly part of either world. ""North Owl"" (one of LeGuin's rare female protagonists) is a ""half-person""--raised by a woman of the matriarchal Valley (a herdsmen/farmer tribe), but fathered by a passing Condor warrior. She grows up without a father in her mother's nature-respecting world; later, in her rebellious adolescence, she joins her father and becomes a woman of the war-seeking Condors, marrying, and bearing a child. Ultimately, assuming the new name of ""Woman Coming Home,"" she travels with her own small daughter back to The Valley, as the precarious, war-centered economy of the Condors begins to collapse, taking tribal solidarity along with it. Because LeGuin is adapting relatively familiar (American Indian) paradigms, there are fewer sheer triumphs of wit and imagination than in such science-fiction novels as Left Hand of Darkness, which have offered the geography, customs and languages of entirely invented worlds. In addition, the bulky apparatus of poems, folk tales, maps, illustrations, glossary--even a taped cassette of ""Valley"" music (unavailable for review, but not performed, at any rate, by Moon Unit Zappa)--often overwhelms what should be central here: the delicate, beautifully told story of North Owl's education. Still, the heroine's efforts to strike a balance between opposing claims (between mother and father, spirit and mind, husbandry and conquest, peace and war) mark a return by LeGuin to the themes and techniques of her major work. And no one does this type of utopian near-allegory better. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Kirkus Review
LeGuin here focuses her inimitable world-building skills on two conflicting societies of the future--implying, of course, their relevance to the present. Far less preachy than 1974's The Dispossessed, this is equally intelligent and ambitious. It lacks, however, the flawless integration of storyline and interspersed folk-material that characterized 1969's The Left Hand of Darkness. The novel is set in northern California in some far distant future that has been shaped by earthquakes and social upheaval. There are computers and contraceptives, tanks and antibiotics, but this is a world governed by human customs, not by technological ""progress."" The two societies LeGuin describes are both tribal, though she prevents us from thinking of either as ""primitive."" As in Shevek's role as mediator between the planets Urres and Anarres in The Dispossessed, the two cultures in conflict here are observed by a narrator not wholly part of either world. ""North Owl"" (one of LeGuin's rare female protagonists) is a ""half-person""--raised by a woman of the matriarchal Valley (a herdsmen/farmer tribe), but fathered by a passing Condor warrior. She grows up without a father in her mother's nature-respecting world; later, in her rebellious adolescence, she joins her father and becomes a woman of the war-seeking Condors, marrying, and bearing a child. Ultimately, assuming the new name of ""Woman Coming Home,"" she travels with her own small daughter back to The Valley, as the precarious, war-centered economy of the Condors begins to collapse, taking tribal solidarity along with it. Because LeGuin is adapting relatively familiar (American Indian) paradigms, there are fewer sheer triumphs of wit and imagination than in such science-fiction novels as Left Hand of Darkness, which have offered the geography, customs and languages of entirely invented worlds. In addition, the bulky apparatus of poems, folk tales, maps, illustrations, glossary--even a taped cassette of ""Valley"" music (unavailable for review, but not performed, at any rate, by Moon Unit Zappa)--often overwhelms what should be central here: the delicate, beautifully told story of North Owl's education. Still, the heroine's efforts to strike a balance between opposing claims (between mother and father, spirit and mind, husbandry and conquest, peace and war) mark a return by LeGuin to the themes and techniques of her major work. And no one does this type of utopian near-allegory better. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Envisioning a possible future (and attacking present folly), Le Guin reinvents a ``primitive'' past. The autobiography of a woman of the Kesh, living in the Napa Valley in a distant post-Industrial age, occupies 100 pages. The rest of the book (and a cassette) provide documentation of Kesh spiritual and material culture, from kinship and language to arts and philosophy. Dancing their oneness with nature, valuing cooperation over competition, the Kesh survive contact with the hieratic, war-making, death-dealing Condors, who are a lot like us. If it's hard to believe in a people who use computers and electricity but plow with oxen and see wealth as giving, that's part of the point. The narrative is interrupted by poems, tales, and ``data,'' which demand patient pondering--something Le Guin's many admirers are certain to provide. However, the considerable pleasures of this book are not the pleasures of the novel. Patrica Dooley, formerly with English Dept., Drexel Univ., Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Set in a northern California of the still-distant future, this 1985 novel by the popular Le Guin qualifies for inclusion in the Press's "California Fiction" series, though it's easy to imagine that commercial reprinters avoided the massive narrative because of its bulky blend of poetry, folk tales, maps, drawings, glossary, and music (tape available by mail). On its first appearance, Kirkus admired Le Guin's "inimitable world-building skills," but felt this utopian novel didn't measure up to her masterpiece, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). Le Guin compares two future societies in conflict, but she's "adapting relatively familiar (American Indian) paradigms." So, said Kirkus, "there are fewer sheer triumphs of wit and imagination" than in her other work. Le Guin, we thought, lost focus amidst the weighty supplementary material. At the same time, "no one does this type of utopian near-allegory better."