[In the following review, Kobel offers a tempered assessment of Always Coming Home, which he describes as “an ambitious, imaginative work” that “is not entirely successful.”]

One approaches Ursula Le Guin’s novel, Always Coming Home, with a measure of skepticism. A collaboration that includes 100 drawings by Margaret Chodos and a cassette of music by Todd Barton, this work of “future archeology” seems at first “gimmicky.” But if it is not entirely successful, it is an ambitious, imaginative work.

Le Guin has always been largely indifferent to the technological trapping of science fiction. Instead, she has focused on ecological and feminist themes, on psychology, on characters.

The anthropological thrust of her new novel reveals something of her roots: She is the daughter of the noted anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber and author Theodora Kroeber, who wrote a biography of the last “wild” Indian in America.

Always Coming Home describes a pastoral people living in northern California in the distant future after a nuclear war. The Kesh, as they are called, are much like American Indians, and the book is a collection of their traditional stories, poems, songs, fragments of novels, and dramas. The only parts that resemble a conventional novel, scattered through the long book, concern a woman who leaves the peace-loving Kesh to join her father among the aggressive, warlike Dayao—（a contrast often seen in Le Guin’s work）.

These parts, told by Stone Telling, are the most interesting and tie the book together. Le Guin intended for the Kesh collectively to be the novel’s protagonist. It doesn’t quite work, and the reader would have preferred more of Stone Telling’s story.

The Kesh have something close to utopia in this liberal, humanistic book. They live simply in small villages, very close to nature, though they have the resources of high technology—they are plugged into a worldwide computer network. There are ironic touches that make the utopia ambiguous （unambiguous utopias are boring）. The Kesh, for instance, are matriarchal, and men are discriminated against. They have no god, or gods, but do have a strong sense of the sacredness of nature that our culture has all but lost.

The drawings by Margaret Chodos, either realistic drawings of the kind seen in natural history books or stylized Indian-influenced works, are quite good. The cassette features chanting in the invented Kesh language and Barton’s music, a sort of mystical minimalism.

Altogether, this is an intriguing work, one that breaks the genre barriers. It is, however, so lacking in conventional science fiction baggage, one wonders if Le Guin’s readers will follow her on this trip.