Always Coming Home (Magill’s Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature)
At a glance:
- Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
- First Published: 1985
- Type of Work: Novel
- Type of Plot: Science fiction—future history
- Time of Work: Several centuries in the future, backtracking to the present
- Setting: Northern California
- Genres: Long fiction, Science fiction
- Subjects: Culture, North America or North Americans, United States or Americans, Twentieth century, Future, California, West, U.S., Feminism, Pacific Northwest, Greenhouse effect or global warming
- Locales: Northern California
The Plot
Ursula Le Guin’s narrator in Always Coming Home is Pandora, mistress of ceremonies for the unraveling of a richly complex tale spanning several centuries. Pandora in Greek mythology was the beguiling human upon whom Zeus, king of the gods, bestowed an unquenchable curiosity. Ignoring all admonitions, she opened the forbidden box she received. It contained the world’s evils, now loosed upon civilization.
Le Guin’s Pandora lives in two worlds separated by centuries. She moves facilely between them as spokesperson for a past civilization and narrator...
[The entire page is 966 words long]
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