Always Coming Home

 Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home may be one of the most unusual novels -- if that's what to call it -- ever written. It has a central story, that of "Stone Telling," and like many other works of speculative and fantastic fiction, it has maps, charts, and a lexicon of its invented language. But the level of detail is much greater than what most would expect, and the guiding structure is not that of a conventional novel at all; it's more like an anthropological study of a people -- the Kesh -- who, although they don't exist (yet) are studied as though they did. Some texts are pure narratives, whether Stone Telling's longer ones or the short stories, both mythological and historical; others are purely informational, written from disinterested position of a social scientist. And, in the midst of all this, a character named "Pandora" does her best to question, to trouble, and to interrupt any too-easy understanding of the whole, occasionally in dialogue with someone who, though she is the "author" of parts of the book, is not -- apparently -- completely in charge of it. When first released in 1985, the book came in a case which included a cassette tape of the "music and poetry of the Kesh"; now, in this digital age, there are links whereby this same material may be purchased and downloaded online.

In creating the multi-layered text that is Always Coming Home, Le Guin draws upon not only her experience as a writer of science fiction, but on her childhood memories and the world of her parents. Her father, Alfred L. Kroeber, was an eminent anthropologist who worked with many of the world's lesser-known tribes, and for a time took Ishi -- described as "the last wild Indian in America," the only surviving member of his tribe -- into his home. Ishi was studied extensively, and lived out his last years with the Kroebers; Alfred's wife Theodora wrote her own account, Ishi in Two Worlds, which became a best-selling book on its publication in 1961. Sadly, by that time Ishi was long dead, his life and then his body made the subject of scientific study. His brain, in fact, was retained by the laboratory after his burial, and was only re-united with the rest of him after public criticism, a story documented in the book Ishi's Brain. Ursula Le Guin didn't speak much about these histories, but certainly her parents' careers and writing must have influenced her, along with the curious traces of this man and his vanished culture.

For the "Kesh" people, too, live in California -- or what was California. The maps show that the central valley of California, where so much of its and the nation's produce is grown, has by this future time been completely inundated, and now forms an "Inland Sea." But the river that empties into this sea, and alongside which the Kesh dwell, is easily recognizable; this is the Napa River, its name worn down to simply Na in this future world. And the Kroeber's summer home, too -- with the curious name of "Kishamish" -- was in the valley of this same river.

Now, thirty-four years after the original version, comes a new "Author's Expanded Edition," apparently one of the last things Le Guin worked on before her death in 2018. It offers, most centrally, an extension of the other novel within a novel, "Dangerous People," but there are also some additional poems, as well as a couple of fascinating interviews about how the process for the book -- particularly the collaboration with Todd Barton, and how the Kesh's musical instruments were "built" -- for fans of the book, it's one last treasure trove of information.