History Literature / AlwaysComingHome

* LanguageEqualsThought: 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 - more like a compulrive hoarder. 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 RussianReversal-style comedy.

* ArcSymbol: Heyiya-if, a hinged spiral reflecting the world view as described above, with the left arm representing Earth and the right Sky. The Kesh include it not only in things like their drawings; their cities are laid according to it, with the left arm containing living houses (in case of the largest town, several arms were needed), the right arm, the heyimas (multifunctional public structures), and the hinge being some sort of spring or waterfall.
* ArmchairMilitary: The Dayao leader never left his palace, yet everyone was expected to follow his orders without questions, including in military campaigns. It works about as well as it sounds.

* DreadfulMusician: "A Vaunting" and "A response" are two mock poems, with one side claiming their musicians are wonderful, and the other... it might be an exaggeration.

* LanguageEqualsThought: 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 RussianReversal-style comedy.

* NotQuiteTheRightThing: This is how the people of the Valley viewed four men who spent a month carrying home four corpses of their friends who died in a poisoned land. Nice, but the effort is excessive.

* TogetherInDeath: ''The Wedding Night at Chukulmas'' has a wedding ceremony[[note]]Proper weddings are only conducted on a particular day of the year in the Valley.[[/note]] joined by the ghosts of a man and a woman who died before they could get married. In the end, it is agreed the formal ceremony can, in fact, be performed for them.

** Todd Barton, who worked with Le Guin to write and record the Kesh music to accompany the book, relates that they were initially denied copyright because of a misunderstanding that they were actually reproducing the work of real Kesh speakers. Le Guin and Barton explained that so far as they knew; only two people in the world then spoke Kesh.

* FantasticAnthropologist: Much of the book is structured like an anthropologist's notes on the Kesh people. But in a couple of segments, Creator/UrsulaKLeGuin inverts the plot device and provides Kesh perspectives on then-current real humans. The Kesh think "they all had their heads on backwards".

* IWillFindYou: One of the Kesh stories in is about a young woman who goes missing. Her boyfriend is desperate to find her again, but it's only a fragment (in the extended edition, it is more, but still misses the ending), so we never learn if he does.

The book is mostly centered around the Kesh People who live in nine towns in the Valley of River Na, what we nowadays know as the Napa County, California, near Mount Saint Helena (a sacred location to them). They are a simple, utopian society with low population, and echnology limited to the level they can maintain comfortably, and no government in the sense we know it.

The civilization we know has collapsed. The world has barely any resources left, the ecology is in shambles, vast parts of the land are polluted and poisonous. But a few people still live there. The population compared to the pre-catastrophe era, and a good proportion of the babies are stillborn due to genetic diseases. The people accept this situation.

''Always Coming Home'' is a 1985 novel by Creator/UrsulaKLeGuin describing an AfterTheEnd future.

The civilization we know has collapsed. The world has barely any resources left, the ecology is in shambles, vast parts of the land are polluted and poisonous. People still live there. Very few compared to the current population, and with a good portion of the babies stillborn due to genetic diseases.

And they are fine with that.

The book is mostly centered around the Kesh People. They live in nine towns in the Valley of River Na; what we nowadays know as the Napa County, California, near Mount Saint Helena (a sacred location to them). A simple, reasonably utopian society with low population, tech limited to the level they can maintain comfortably, and no government in the sense we know it.

And there is the Internet. Surviving [=AIs=] maintain the network for people in exchange for data about them. They also maintain research, space infrastructure, probes launched to study the universe -- all to the extent that it doesn't interfere with the ecosystem.

It is largely an example of {{worldbuilding}}, containing descriptions of the Kesh culture, their [[{{Conlang}} language]], as well as their folklore. The original edition even had a cassette included, with songs and poems in the Kesh language. Currently, these are available for purchase both in digital form and vinyl.

''Always Coming Home'' is a 1985 novel by Creator/UrsulaKLeGuin. It describes a future. An AfterTheEnd future.

And there is the Internet. Surviving AIs maintain the network for people in exchange for data about them. They also maintain research, space infrastructure, probes launched to study the universe - all to the extent that it doesn’t interfere with the ecosystem.

In 2019, an expanded edition of the book came out, containing both new material (such as the Kesh language syntax in addition to the glossary) and a number of essays explaining the backstory and Le Guin’s lectures on related subjects.

* TheAlternet: The Exchange, as it is called. AIs maintain it for both themselves and humanity. No proper security, but any data older than 24 hours is automatically archived, and digging it up is problematic due to the lack of a user-friendly search engine.
* AlternativeCalendar: The Kesh People don’t have one in the usual sense, although they keep track of certain multi-year cycles for the sake of things like wine age.

* ArtificialIntelligence: The Exchange is operated by a solar-system spanning network of AIs that otherwise exist entirely separately from humans.
* AuthorAvatar: While she never appears, Pandora mentions that she got much of her information from a Kesh woman called Little Bear Woman, which is a English translation of the Latin name "Ursula".
* AwesomeButImpractical: The Dayao attempt to build a few airplanes as a SuperweaponSurprise. In the PostPeakOil setting, they are forced to resort to biofuel production, and it turns out the whole food production of their city (built in a spot rather bad for agriculture at that) is insufficient to provide enough, even without accounting for, you know, the people’s need to eat.

* CaliforniaCollapse: Not quite a collapse, but a lot of today’s structures are visible under the water, and it appears that Northern California has flooded.

* ChildByRape: Hwette from ''Dangerous People'' is revealed to be one, courtesy of her mother’s boyfriend who didn’t take the breakup lightly. Averted by Stone Telling, who claims she did an abortion after her Dayao husband invoked MaritalRapeLicence once.

* DefenestrateAndBerate: One of the Kesh forms of divorce is a woman taking her husband’s things out of the house.

** In "the Miller", the titular character jumps into his mill’s machinery once he realizes [[MyGodWhatHaveIDone what he did]].
* EitherWorldDominationOrSomethingAboutBananas: Played with a lot. The Kesh have very different conceptual divisions and metaphors than both the readers and the other cultures in the setting; which gives abundant opportunities for extreme misunderstandings - such as Terter Abhao, with Kesh as his second language, saying something that gets heard as both "you and I should go on a short walk" and "I need to depart with the army for years" depending on who is listening.

* FromCataclysmToMyth: The Kesh are aware the world has been damaged by the actions of past humans, but aren’t exactly interested in knowing more.

** The Coyote cutting off a bear’s balls in one of the stories, and then a human commander doing it to himself.

* HeadTurnedBackwards: The most feared bogeyman of the Kesh is the otherwise human-looking "Backward-Head," a literalized metaphor of our current civilization and its complete craziness which ruined the ecosystem. Backwards-Heads thrive on poison and are driven by irrational fear and malice, because it makes no sense to the inhabitants of the Valley for anyone to cause that much lasting damage under any ''other'' circumstances.
-->"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."

* HigherUnderstandingThroughDrugs: In "The Visionary", the narrator claims both herself and others attempted to enhance their visions through alcohol and cannabis, but it’s a method considered cheap, and also not very efficient.

* IOweYouMyLife: Inverted in the Valley, at least with medicine. A doctor who saves a person’s life is considered to be the one in debt, being akin to a parent now. One doctor was forced to swap towns due to all the debts in the old place. In the new one, he concentrated on animals and terminal patients.

* TheImmodestOrgasm: The teller of the Visionary’s story talks at one point about her aunt and uncle making a lot of noise in their lovemaking every night.

* KlingonScientistsGetNoRespect: The people of the Valley are highly suspicious toward Millers, which includes all people working with advanced machinery and electricity. These people also don’t have a House assigned to them as a group, which means no one protecting them in case of a screw up.

* LovingAShadow: That’s how Stone Telling views her mother’s love toward Terter Abhao. She never knew his people’s culture, so how could she know the kind of man he really was?
* ManlyMenCanHunt: 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.

* MistakenForGay: That was one of the possibilities discussed by the Valley people when they saw the Dayao army - for them, it was unimaginable that such a large group of people would contain no women.

* MoodWhiplash: "Chandi", a play which has a man’s fortune reversed like that of [[Literature/BookOfJob Job]] (a comparison actually made in some editions).
* MutualKill: The evening stories about the Coyote and the humans have the war general’s sons kill each other.
* MyGodWhatHaveIDone: In "The Miller", the titular character, after raping a woman he was obsessed with (an incestous relationship to boot), jumps into his watermill’s wheel.

* NotQuiteTheRightThing: That's how the people of the Valley viewed four men who spent a month carrying home four corpses of their friends who died in a poisoned land. Nice, but the effort is excessive.

* OneDialogueTwoConversations: The conversations between Willow and Terter Abhao often come out as that, due to their different views on both property and behavior (plus Terter’s poor grasp of the Kesh language).

* RapeAsDrama: The Miller raping a woman (a case of incest) is treated as one. Not so much in other cases described: both Stone Telling and Shamsha fell pregnant from a rape, and Shamsha didn’t even see it as something serious enough to tell others, nor saw a reason to abort the child. The RapePillageAndBurn actions of the Dayao, on the other hand, aren’t taken lightly.
* RiteOfPassageNameChange: The people of the Warrior Lodge took different names upon joining it. All people in the Valley changed their names over the course of their lives if they lived long enough, but the exact conditions aren’t described.
* RoyalBlood: 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.

* TheScapegoat: A lot of people among the Dayao once their ruler’s policy of trying to take on the entire continent at once was shown not to go as smoothly as expected. After all, there was no way their divine GloriousLeader was at fault.

* TeenyWeenie: 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.

* TranslationConvention: A primary device of the book is that it is Le Guin, in the persona of "Pandora", translating texts / songs / interviews from Kesh and the other [[ConLang constructed languages]] she invented.

* YoungerThanTheyLook: It is mentioned that Terter Abhao appeared to have aged prematurely the last time his daughter saw him.

* TheImmodestOrgasm: The teller of the Visionary’s story talks at one point about her sister and her husband making a lot of noise in their lovemaking every night.

* OurVampiresAreDifferent: "Dira" describes a creature which used its powers to enter a household under a human guise, where it ate all the food, making the humans starve nearly to death (it was stopped while two of the three people were still alive) while it literally bloated with their blood.

* ForbiddenLove: Relationships between people in the any one of the Five Houses are taboo and treated as incest, even absent any familial connection. Le Guin describes this by analogy to moiety kinship systems in various real-life cultures.

* DirtyOldWoman: Marigold, who used to dance the Moon (an annual orgy festival) almost until her death, usually picking some young boy afraid to approach a woman he actually liked.