Always Coming Home (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

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Prophetic Fallacy: Stone Telling has a vision at one point of her father's corpse. When he shows up later, she believes her vision to be false, but later, when he helps her escape the Dayao people, she realizes it must have been a vision of the future. Naïve Newcomer: Stone Telling has a lot of that when living among the Dayao. Her father, correspondingly, has his moments in the Valley.

Bernardo, Susan M.; Murphy, Graham J. (2006). Ursula K. Le Guin: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. pp.19–20. Utopia: Discussed, especially in the Framing Device when Pandora talks with a Kesh woman and complains about how "utopians" are a bother. The Kesh are at least partially In Harmony with Nature, wealth is determined by generosity, homophobia and sexism are minimized, and there is no need for police or an army, but there's also superstition, violence, and cruelty. Discusses the types of fantasy that contemporary culture finds acceptable for children. Suggests that children's fantasy literature must have clearly defined good and bad characters and situations, that good must win, and that children must respect cultural limits put on them. Royal Blood: It is stated that when the Condor's son was to be executed, no one dared to raise a hand against him. Instead, they gave him the chair and said it was electricity that killed him.

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Defenestrate and Berate: One of the Kesh forms of divorce is a woman taking her husband's things out of the house. Manly Men Can Hunt: For the Dayao, a man's rite of passage involves killing a condor or at least a buzzard. Inverted with the Kesh: hunting is for young boys, not adults. One poem has a story of a man whose penis was tired of constantly being forced to work, so it cut itself off and ran away.

Noodle Implements: One of the texts given is from a paper scrap titled "A list of things that will be needed four days from now". 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. 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.James Bittner, Approaches to the Fiction of Ursula K Le Guin, University of Michigan Research Press, 1984, 149 pps. Erlich, Richard D. (1997). "Always Coming Home". Coyote's Song: The Teaching Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin. The Milford Series Popular Writers of Today. Wildside Press. p.247. ISBN 978-1-4344-5775-2. ISSN 0163-2469. Archived from the original on 2012-03-18 . Retrieved 2013-02-20. Le Guin's novel challenges the basic concept of scientific observation. She argues that a scientist cannot write outside of her culture and, therefore, must forget claims of objectivity. We see the Kesh and the Condors not as they are, but how Pandora sees them. This is the hypocrisy that Le Guin challenges: the late twentieth century idea that science is not influenced by human behavior.

Never Learned to Read: The Dayao consider the acts of reading and writing to be sacred, parts of the act of Creation, so any commoner attempting to engage in either is punished severely. This causes a lot of confusion for Night Owl: among the Kesh, the only ones illiterate are those physically or mentally incapable of reading. The book's setting is a time so post-apocalyptic that no cultural source can remember the apocalypse, though a few folk tales refer to our time. The only signs of our civilization that have lasted into their time are indestructible artefacts such as styrofoam and a self-manufacturing, self-maintaining, solar-system-wide computer network. There has been a great sea level rise since our time, flooding much of northern California, where the story takes place.The Coyote cutting off a bear's balls in one of the stories, and then a human commander doing it to himself. So these things human beings had done to the world must have been deliberate and conscious acts of evil, serving the purposes of wrong understanding, fear, and greed. The people who had done these things had done wrong mindfully. They had had their heads on wrong." It has been noted that Always Coming Home underscores Le Guin's long-standing anthropological interests. The Valley of the Na [River] is modeled on the landscape of California's Napa Valley, where Le Guin spent her childhood when her family was not in Berkeley. [7] Meaningful Rename: People in the Valley tend to have three names throughout their lives; as children, as adults and as old people. The mother of Stone Telling was Willow as an adult, and once she broke up with Terter, demanded to be called by her childhood name, Towhee. It was considered an extremely wrong action which her daughter never accepted, and upon her death, she was mourned as Ashes. Stone Telling herself also had a fourth (or rather, second) name while living among the Dayao. Language Equals Thought: Actually averts the common mistakes. When some Kesh people grow fascinated with the Dayao idea of "armies", they have no trouble about having no words: they simply adopt the foreign ones. Likewise, it is entirely possible to say that a person is wealthy in the modern sense of possessing much instead of giving much, it just won't be seen as a positive trait. However, the Kesh grammar allows for no means to express the idea of owning a living being; any attempt to say it will come across as a Russian Reversal-style comedy.