Always Coming Home is a highly experimental novel. Le Guin's guiding intention was to invite collaboration between the writer and the reader, so that reading would not be a merely passive exercise. Here the reader must in effect create the novel through the materials the author has provided. Le Guin's techniques are boldly unconventional, and the responsive reader can collaborate in a rich creative experience. One can begin reading Always Coming Home at any point, not just at the beginning, since the reading experience is not one of following a suspenseful plot to a climactic resolution but rather of moving in a multiplicity of directions around a visionary center.

Not Quite the Right Thing: This is how the people of the Valley viewed four men who spent a month carrying home four corpses of their friends who died in a poisoned land. Nice, but the effort is excessive. North Owl is the main character in the novel “Stone Telling”, nested within Always Coming Home and also set in the Valley of Na, where the Kesh live. At the beginning of her story she explains the origin of her name – “In Sinshan babies’ names often come from birds, since they are messengers. In the month before my mother bore me, an owl came every night to the oak trees called Gairga outside the windows of High Porch House, on the north side, and sang the owl’s song there; so my first name was North Owl.” Family Extermination: After The Condor executes his son, he also executes his wives, concubines, children and slaves.

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Rape as Drama: The Miller raping a woman (a case of incest) is treated as one. Not so much in other cases described: both Stone Telling and Shamsha fell pregnant from a rape, and Shamsha didn't even see it as something serious enough to tell others, nor saw a reason to abort the child. The Rape, Pillage, and Burn actions of the Dayao, on the other hand, aren't taken lightly.

letter responding to the chapter about The Left Hand of Darkness in David Ketterer's book, New Worlds For Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature, see Le Guin, Ursula K. (July 1975). "Ketterer on The Left Hand Of Darkness". Science Fiction Studies. SF-TH. 2 (6): 139. The novel received the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and was a runner up for the National Book Awards. [5] [6] Literary significance and criticism [ edit ] Mutual Kill: The evening stories about the Coyote and the humans have the war general's sons kill each other. Either "World Domination", or Something About Bananas: Played with a lot. The Kesh have very different conceptual divisions and metaphors than both the readers and the other cultures in the setting; which gives abundant opportunities for extreme misunderstandings — such as Terter Abhao, with Kesh as his second language, saying something that gets heard as both "you and I should go on a short walk" and "I need to depart with the army for years" depending on who is listening.

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Stone Telling recounts how she spent her childhood with her mother's people in the Valley, as a very young woman lived several years with her father's people in The City, and escaped from it with her daughter, who was born there. The two societies are contrasted through her narrative: the Kesh are peaceable and self-organized, whereas the Condor people of The City are rigid, patriarchal, hierarchical, militaristic, and expansionist. In "the Miller", the titular character jumps into his mill's machinery once he realizes what he did.

In this recording we hear Ursula’s voice reading us a poem in Kesh, which according to the liner notes was “Recorded in the Blue Clay heyimas of Kastosha-na.” For the Kesh, the heyimas were the buildings where the activities of the Five Houses of Earth – Obsidian, Blue Clay, Serpentine, Yellow Adobe and Red Adobe – took place. Humans and other beings were divided into these houses, each of which was further associated with specific arts and societies. The Second House of Earth, Blue Clay, is associated with Water Art, such as wells, aquifers, irrigation, sewage and storage. War Is Hell: For Kesh, war is idiocy, at least on the scale they are familiar with it (a dozen people fighting another tribe over some offense). Stone Telling, however, who had lived with the warlike Dayao, has learned and describes the horrors of war in detail.Virginity Flag: As a variant, taking on a sexual partner is the stage where a person starts wearing dyed clothing.

Proud Warrior Race Guy: The Dayao are that. Causes Terter Abhao a lot of trouble with Willow, for whom all his achievements and heroics are meaningless or childish. Space Amish: The Kesh principle of only using technology on a level they can easily maintain on their own is actually quite close to the Amish views.Ursula K Le Guin, "The Language of the Night." Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Susan Wood, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1979, 239 pps. Post-Apocalyptic Dog: A frequent trouble in the Valley. Ironically, domesticated dogs mainly serve the purpose of protecting against those. No child ever goes into the forest without at least one. 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. 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.