This book tries really hard to bill itself as a novel. It’s right there on the cover: "A Novel", and the introduction tries to reframe what a novel is to make it work stating it’s oriented geographically rather than narratively. Even calling it a fix-up novel, though, would be charitable. In actuality, the book is a novella with a collection of short stories and world-building appendices edited in. It's great.

Always Coming Home is structured as a series of documents transcribed and collected by a fictional anthropologist covering a society called the Kesh. The Kesh live in Napa Valley of an immemorial future, where sea levels have risen, pockets of irradiated wastelands remain, and fossil fuels are depleted. The Kesh are a matriarchal, almost animistic society, the details of which are explored through short stories framed as the Kesh’s legends and oral histories. Other parts are more encyclopedic as appendices, charts, and maps.

The novella, Stone Telling, stands out as the best longest part of the collection. It’s the oral history of a Kesh woman who grows up in Kesh society but goes to live with her father’s society: the patriarchal, nomadic people of the Condor.

As with so much of her other works, LeGuin deftly creates societies in the world that never fall completely into dystopia or utopia; the Kesh are not without their interpersonal and interfactional struggles and the bellicose Condor are not without sympathetic characters navigating their world the best they can. The relationship with technology is similarly complex. A self sustaining satellite internet passively observes humanity and remains as a trove of knowledge, but the Kesh feel little need for it, and the Condor only want to make war machines. Everyone in Kesh society is allowed to access this digital trove, but they see little use for it. With the Condor, on the other hand, only the leader is allowed to access it so all their attempts to make complex machines are unbolstered by the infrastructure to maintain them.

The Kesh's relationship with technology is reciprocal, with an understanding that through work objects and technology shape people in return. It's an idea that is - for me - reminiscent of Heidegger and Ellul and is encapsulated in some of my favorite passages:

"It was a good thing for me to learn a craft with a true maker. It may have been the best thing I have done. Nothing we do is better than the work of handmind. When mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast; even speech using the voice may go to fast. The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time. Purity is on the edge of evil, they say."

and

"If you don't teach machines and horses to do what you want in their way they'll teach you to do what they want in your way."

For the Kesh, this reciprocal nature of things is living inside the world. To do otherwise, as with the Condor, is to live outside it. Their leader is described as follows:

"He was dressed in golden cloth and wore a gold and black Condor helmet with the beak mask, so I did not see the man at all, but only casings and surfaces, nothing of what was within. To be The Condor is to be outside."

The Condor leader, being at the top of the hierarchy and in a sense owning all of his society is also outside it, and this is reflected in his veiled visage. This outsideness, is a trait shared by the men of the Condor society, even if to a lesser degree. Two people having fled the lands of the Condor and living in Kesh culture remark:

"Even here the men are animals. Here everybody belongs to everybody. A Dayao [Condor] man belongs to himself. He thinks everything else belongs to him, women, animals, things, the world"

"We call that living outside the world"

LeGuin’s pedigree as the child of anthropologists is on full display, and overall it paints a picture of a world that is complex and ironic, alien to our own but with characters whose struggles feel strikingly similar to ours, as if the trappings of technology, culture, and religion only color the human condition rather than solve its problems.