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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Compares the narrative techniques and Utopian ideologies in novels by Doris Lessing and Ursula Le Guin. I Owe You My Life: Inverted in the Valley, at least with medicine. A doctor who saves a person's life is considered to be the one in debt, being akin to a parent now. One doctor was forced to swap towns due to all the debts in the old place. In the new one, he concentrated on animals and terminal patients. 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. Good Girls Avoid Abortion: The Dayao nobles would never consider an abortion, but the commoners are stated to have them more often than not. Definitely averted for the Kesh people, who are a complete pro-choice society (except for girls younger than eighteen, who are never allowed to become mothers). Stone Telling mentions having an abortion after a case of Marital Rape License by her Dayao husband.

James Bittner, Approaches to the Fiction of Ursula K Le Guin, University of Michigan Research Press, 1984, 149 pps. Ursula K. Le Guin & Todd Barton. “A Teaching Poem”. Music and Poetry of the Kesh. Freedom to Spend, 2019.

Teeny Weenie: At the end of "A Bay Laurel Song", the person's penis runs away, so he now grows himself a new one but... isn't very far along. Child by Rape: Hwette from Dangerous People is revealed to be one, courtesy of her mother's boyfriend, who didn't take the breakup lightly. Averted by Stone Telling, who claims she did an abortion after her Dayao husband invoked Marital Rape Licence once.

Defenestrate and Berate: One of the Kesh forms of divorce is a woman taking her husband's things out of the house.

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Offing the Offspring: The Dayao ruler imprisons and later executes his son for disagreeing with him. Yet, how will we get there? How will we find this Valley for our children’s children’s children?Perhaps all we need to do is follow the trail of breadcrumbs that Ursula K Le Guin has left us — her magical words and her wonderful maps of the terrain of what it means to be human. Similarly, as in many of her earlier novels, Le Guin structures her narrative around a journey which involves her protagonist in two contrasting cultures. For the first time, however, her central figure here is a woman, Stone Telling, who is somewhat of an outsider in both cultures because of her mixed parentage. Her mother is of the Kesh--an egalitarian, agrarian, peace-loving culture which centers on celebrations of nature and a philosophy of generous giving. Her father, however, is a roving warrior from the Dayao or Condor culture--a rigidly patriarchal, militaristic culture which is destroying itself and its neighbors through its blind monotheism and greed.

Music and Poetry of the Kesh by Ursula K. Le Guin & Todd Barton". Bandcamp. Archived from the original on 2018-04-05 . Retrieved 5 May 2018. Bernardo, Susan M.; Murphy, Graham J. (2006). Ursula K. Le Guin: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. pp.19–20. 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.This excerpt from a ‘long singing’ of the Sun Ceremonies of midwinter was recorded in the Obsidian heyimas of Telína’na. The large central room of the heyimas, underground, wooden walled and with a high wooden roof, gives the voices a reverberant quality. About thirty-six people took part in the long singing. Some of them had been singing for about four hours when this recording was made, at midnight, and went on singing until dawn. The syllables sung are those of the word ‘heya’.” (from release liner notes) Lillian M. Heldreth, "To Defend or to Correct Patterns of Culture in Always Coming Home," Mythlore, Autumn, 1989, pp. 58-63, 66. Bangs and Whimpers: Novelists at Armageddon” by Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich, The New York Times (13 March 1988) The society is not based on profit but on giving. Someone is considered rich who gives much; someone is poor if he is miserly. This ethic defines the society, informing many stories and the language itself. People do not own the land but have its use for their families, giving any surplus to a common storehouse. A creation such as a story or a poem is not completed until it is given—recited and performed for the whole community.

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. M. J. Hardman, "Linguistics and Science Fiction: A Language and Gender Short Bibliography," Women and Language, Spring, 1999, pp. 47-8. 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-Peak Oil: To a degree which causes a lot of problems when the Dayao people try to fuel the bombers they build.In addition to poems and folk tales, Le Guin created verse dramas, records of oral performances, recipes, and even an alphabet and glossary of the Kesh language. The novel is illustrated throughout with drawings by artist Margaret Chodos and includes a musical component—original recordings of Kesh songs that Le Guin collaborated on with composer Todd Barton—bringing this utterly original and compelling world to life. Peter Fitting, "The Turn from Utopia in Recent Feminist Fiction," in Feminism, Utopia, and Narrative, edited by Libby Falk Jones and Sarah Webster Goodwin, The University of Tennessee Press, 1990, pp. 141-58. My God, What Have I Done?: In "The Miller", the titular character, after raping a woman he was obsessed with (an incestuous relationship, to boot), jumps into his watermill's wheel. Creation Myth: A few are told by people in the book. It is unclear how much of it is tradition and how much is made up on the spot. Upon reading Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin, one feels as though entering an anthropological museum filled with artefacts from a past civilization; we can discover maps charting where the Kesh lived, drawings and descriptions of the plants, trees and rivers that surrounded them; collections of recipes and descriptions of how they dressed; detailed notes explaining their society, kinship, sexuality, medicine and funerary rites; folk tales, plays, poems, stories and descriptions of rites and rituals, with detailed descriptions of what their instruments looked and sounded like.