Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Read Online Free PDF Page A

Guin

Always Coming Home (1985)

     
    IN THE 1950S and ’60s—arguably the true “Golden Age of Science Fiction,” when the genre matured as a form—the finest sf novels were sleek, small, supercharged engines designed to snap readers instantly into the fast lane and get them to the astounding end of the freeway, preferably with a bang at the end. As fashions changed, and popular fiction grew more hefty, pace and astonishment gave way to detail, ornamentation, complex characterization. One-off novels sprouted into trilogies and sagas. Perhaps the most famous was Frank Herbert’s Dune sequence, continued after his death by less artful writers. The most successful was Gene Wolfe’s science fantasy The Book of the New Sun, in four parts with an extra volume to wrap the saga, which then continued anyway with a tetralogy and a trilogy (see Entry 36).
    Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home uses neither of these models. It is self-contained, but contains multitudes. Le Guin defined this sort of approach in an essay, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (1986):
     
the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words…. Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction… is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story…. Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars. [1]
     
    Like her famous The Dispossessed, this novel is an “ambiguous utopia.” A Taoist matrilineal culture of Kesh villages in a far future linked by unobtrusive AIs is bordered by the grasping patriarchy of the Condor. The three-part central story by Stone Telling is, however, only a fifth of this bag-like book. The rest is a collage of Kesh poems, fables, life stories, romantic tales, recipes, reflections by Pandora (an imagined “archeologist of the future”), a glossary, drawings by artist Margaret Chodos and songs composed by Todd Barton.
    So this is an sf novel, but not as we know it, Jim. It’s perhaps science fiction’s equivalent of Moby-Dick, or Ulysses , but more engagingly, lucidly written than either of those often unread masterpieces. Neither is it an entertainment in the vein of The Demolished Man or Ringworld ; it is reflective, moving like the Pacific Coast river Na that flows through a post-Greenhouse, post-ecodoom Napa Valley. In this landscape Le Guin herself grew up, with anthropologist father Arthur and writer mother Theodora Kroeber. The novel is a tribute to both, and perhaps to Clifford Geertz’s model of anthropological “thick description”: immersion in another’s culture, even if, as here, it does not yet exist.
    Stone Telling is herself a halfling, born of a Kesh mother, Willow, and a True Condor father, Kills, or Terter Abhao, Commander of the Army of the South. Thus she’s “half-House,” mocked and teased by the other children, yearning for escape. Though she finds her way to the Condor, who are struggling to build a machine-technology empire in a world now exhausted of metals and easy supplies of power, she returns home disillusioned, regretful, ready to embrace a village life of natural cycles that is, admittedly, a little stifling. “As I speak of it,” she says of her father’s people, “this way sounds clownish. That is myself, my voice; I am the clown. I cannot help the reversals.” But reversals are built in to the daily life of these ambiguous utopians; the basic structure of a Kesh village is a double spiral, like a barred galaxy, like two hands met at the thumbs, or Hinge.
    The storyteller is born North Owl, in the little town of Sinshan, becomes Ayatyu in the City, then Woman Coming Home, and in her old age Stone Telling. By our conventions of empirical realism, some of what she tells seems bizarre and impossible (a