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* CosyCatastrophe: Despite all the past and residual damage to Earth, people seem to be quite happy.
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* CosyCatastrophe: Despite all the past and residual damage to Earth, people seem to be quite happy.happy (except for [[TheEmpire the Dayao]]).
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* ArcNumber: The Kesh divide everything into Nine Houses. The Five Houses of Earth represent corporal things like Earth, human beings, domestic animals and plants. The Four Houses of the sky include things like generic groups, the dead, the unborn, and the fictional. All three numbers are therefore frequent in the book.
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* ArcNumber: The Kesh divide everything into Nine Houses. The Five Houses of Earth represent corporal corporeal things like Earth, the Earth itself, living human beings, domestic animals and plants. domesticated plants and animals. The Four Houses of the sky Sky include things like generic groups, the dead, the unborn, and the fictional. All three numbers are therefore frequent in the book.
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* NonHeteronormativeSociety: Same-gender relationships are described as being treated equivalently to opposite-gender relationships among the Kesh. This is contrasted to other groups, particularly the Dayao.
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* LanguageDrift: The language of the Kesh is unrecognizable to us nowadays. There are also mentions of differences accumulated over time: wen Le Guin describes the Kesh alphabet, she also describes an older archaic alphabet that was abandoned because the language had changed so much it was not usable any more.
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* LanguageDrift: The language of the Kesh is unrecognizable to us nowadays. There are also mentions of differences accumulated over time: wen when Le Guin describes the Kesh alphabet, she also describes an older archaic alphabet that was abandoned because the language had changed so much it was not usable any more.
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* 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.
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* 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 [[ConLang constructed languages]] she invented.
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* 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 ConLangs she invented.
** 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, since Le Guin had invented it.
** 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, since Le Guin had invented it.
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* 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 ConLangs [[ConLang|constructed languages]] she invented.
** 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 spokeKesh, since Le Guin had invented it.Kesh.
** 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
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* LanguageDrift: The language of the Kesh is unrecognizable to us nowadays. There are also mentions of differences accumulated over time.
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* LanguageDrift: The language of the Kesh is unrecognizable to us nowadays. There are also mentions of differences accumulated over time.time: wen Le Guin describes the Kesh alphabet, she also describes an older archaic alphabet that was abandoned because the language had changed so much it was not usable any more.
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* DitchingTheDubNames: In most of the book, the Kesh people's [[MeaningfulName]]s are translated into English. At a few points, Le Guin broke with her own convention to show the reader what the names were supposed to actually sound like.
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* DitchingTheDubNames: In most of the book, the Kesh people's [[MeaningfulName]]s meaningful names are translated into English. At a few points, Le Guin broke with her own convention to show the reader what the names were supposed to actually sound like.
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* FutureImperfect: The data about the past is actually all there, but no one bothers to dig it up.
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* FutureImperfect: The data about the past is actually all there, there in the AI City of Mind's Exchange, but no one bothers to dig it up.up. Also deliberately invoked by Kesh librarians and archivists, who regularly throw out old books and scrolls that nobody is using much anymore.
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* EitherWorldDominationOrSomethingAboutBananas: Played with a lot. The Kesh have very different conceptual divisions and metaphors than the other cultures in the setting and the readers; 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.
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* 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 and the readers; 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.
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* DitchingTheDubNames: In most of the book, the Kesh people's [[MeaningfulName]]s are translated into English. At a few points, Le Guin broke with her own convention to show the reader what the names were supposed to actually sound like.
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* EitherWorldDominationOrSomethingAboutBananas: Played with a lot. The Kesh have very different conceptual divisions and metaphors than the other cultures in the setting and the readers; 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.
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* InTheLocalTongue: One of the recorded Kesh songs sounds quite mystical and impressive, fitting with others in the album. Translated into English, it is the singers [[GettingCrapPastTheRadar quite explicitly propositioning someone for sex]].
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**The footnotes and the back of the book elaborate on this problem at length.
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* 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 ConLangs she invented.
**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, since Le Guin had invented it.
**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, since Le Guin had invented it.
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* ArtificialIntelligence: The Exchange is operated by a solar-system spanning network of AIs that otherwise exist entirely separately from humans.
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* PopulationControl: The Kesh don't like large families. More than two kids is not appreciated (presumably this might be different in case of a population drop).
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* PopulationControl: The Kesh don't like large families. More than two kids is not appreciated (presumably this might be different in case of a population drop). Also enforced by the worldbuilding: accumulated environmental poisons have caused high rates of infertility, miscarriage, and death in early childhood.
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* SchizoTech: The Kesh have electricity and solar panels, a single steam train (pulled by horses when the weather is too dry to risk the engine starting a fire), internet access, and yet a lot of their technology and culture are at the level of pre-Columbian natives.
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* SchizoTech: The Kesh have electricity and solar panels, a single steam train (pulled by horses when the weather is too dry to risk the engine starting a fire), internet access, access via what are described as foldable high-resolution electric ink displays, and yet a lot of their technology and culture are at the level of pre-Columbian natives.
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* OfThePeople: The word "Dayao" means "One People", meaning the people who worship the god they call "One". They consider humans who don't follow One to be animals rather than people.
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* HeadTurnedBackwards: The most feared bogeyman of the Kesh is a tall humanoid with a head turned backwards. It is actually supposed to represent our current civilization, with its complete craziness which ruined the ecosystem.
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* HeadTurnedBackwards: The most feared bogeyman of the Kesh is the otherwise human-looking "Backward-Head," a tall humanoid with a head turned backwards. It is actually supposed to represent literalized metaphor of our current civilization, with civilization and its complete craziness which ruined the ecosystem.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."
** There's also the Wry Neck, a White Clown role intended to invoke the same fear in order to scare kids.
-->"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."
** There's also the Wry Neck, a White Clown role intended to invoke the same fear in order to scare kids.
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** The Ginkgo tree is used as a synonym for homosexuality, due to the need to plant male and female trees far apart (the fruit are described by Wiki/TheOtherWiki to smell "like rancid butter or vomit").
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** The Ginkgo tree is used as a synonym for homosexuality, due to the need to plant male and female trees far apart (the fruit are described by Wiki/TheOtherWiki Website/TheOtherWiki to smell "like rancid butter or vomit").
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* ScrewThisImOuttaHere: Stone Telling describes how, when the Dayao start suffering defeats and foot shortages, a lot of their commoners start running away. She follows soon.
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* ScrewThisImOuttaHere: Stone Telling describes how, when the Dayao start suffering defeats and foot food shortages, a lot of their commoners start running away. She follows soon.
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* LittlestCancerPatient: "The Visionary" has the narrator marrying a man who has two sons, one of them vedet (a terminal illness akin to Alzheimer in symptoms but much more painful).
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* 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.
* LittlestCancerPatient: "The Visionary" has the narrator marrying a man who has two sons, the younger oneof them being vedet (a terminal illness akin to Alzheimer in symptoms but much more painful).
* LittlestCancerPatient: "The Visionary" has the narrator marrying a man who has two sons, the younger one
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* TheBard: The Kesh have several types of Clown for different social purposes, some of which satire society and those behaving badly in a way that exposes their foolishness. When Terter Abhao claims that Willow belongs to him, a Blood Clown mocks him by twisting his words into complete nonsense.
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* BlindedByTheSun: The story of Junco, who spent a day staring at the sun trying to learn the secrets of the universe. The doctors only managed to restore his peripheral vision.
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* EyeScream: The story of Junco, who spent a day staring at the sun trying to learn the secrets of the universe.
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* PerfectPacifistPeople: Subverted. The Kesh war, but only the teenagers, and adults consider war to be immature and foolish. They still have incidents of interpersonal violence.
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* {{Utopia}}: Discussed, especially in the FramingDevice when Pandora talks with a Kesh woman and complains about how "utopians" are a bother. The Kesh are at least partially InHarmonyWithNature, wealth is determined by generosity, homophobia and sexism are minimized, and there is no need for police or an army, but there's also superstition, violence, and evil people hurting others. Kesh society is not perfect, but it's significantly better.
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* {{Utopia}}: Discussed, especially in the FramingDevice when Pandora talks with a Kesh woman and complains about how "utopians" are a bother. The Kesh are at least partially InHarmonyWithNature, wealth is determined by generosity, homophobia and sexism are minimized, and there is no need for police or an army, but there's also superstition, violence, and evil people hurting others. Kesh society is not perfect, but it's significantly better. cruelty.
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* 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".
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* BearsAreBadNews: Like the story of Withy, who got clawed by one.
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* BearsAreBadNews: Like the story of Withy, who got clawed by one. Bears are normally in the House of non-game animals and thus cannot be hunted, but a bear that has attacked humans is seen as having submitted to be killed.
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* CaliforniaCollapse: Not quite a collapse, but a lot of today’s structures are visible under the water.
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* CaliforniaCollapse: Not quite a collapse, but a lot of today’s structures are visible under the water.water, and it appears that Northern California has flooded.
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* {{Utopia}}: Discussed, especially in the FramingDevice when Pandora talks with a Kesh woman and complains about how "utopians" are a bother. The Kesh are at least partially InHarmonyWithNature, wealth is determined by generosity, homophobia and sexism are minimized, and there is no need for police or an army, but there's also superstition, violence, and evil people hurting others. Kesh society is not perfect, but it's significantly better.
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* CommonTongue: The TOK is used as either that or for the internet.
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* CommonTongue: The TOK is used as either that or for TOK, the internet.language of the City of Mind's databases. Humans all around the world learn it in order to access the City's information, and so they are also able to use it as a common tongue across human groups.
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* YouNeedToGetLaid: When North Owl is sick in the Dayao city, a doctor says it is nothing a husband won't cure, in a matter very similar to old discussions about female hysteria.
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* YouNeedToGetLaid: When North Owl Stone Telling is sick in the Dayao city, a doctor says it is nothing a husband won't cure, in a matter very similar to old discussions about female hysteria.
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** "Living on the coast" and "Coming inland" are terms for the mandatory post-puberty chastity and taking on a partner, respectively.
** At the beginning of "Chanti", the people say the titular character is lucky to be marries to such a woman and "To plow and weed and tend and harvest that bit of ground, in the gardens of the night!"
** At the beginning of "Chanti", the people say the titular character is lucky to be marries to such a woman and "To plow and weed and tend and harvest that bit of ground, in the gardens of the night!"
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** "Living on the coast" and "Coming "coming inland" are terms for the mandatory post-puberty chastity and taking on a partner, respectively.
** At the beginning of"Chanti", "Chandi", the people say the titular character is lucky to be marries to such a woman and "To plow and weed and tend and harvest that bit of ground, in the gardens of the night!"
** At the beginning of
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* YouNeedToGetLaid: When Night Owl is sick in the Dayao city, a doctor says it is nothing a husband won't cure, in a matter very similar to old discussions about female hysteria.
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* YouNeedToGetLaid: When Night North Owl is sick in the Dayao city, a doctor says it is nothing a husband won't cure, in a matter very similar to old discussions about female hysteria.
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* NoodleImplements: One of the texts given is from a paper scrap titled "A List of Things that will be Needed Four Days From Now".
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* NoodleImplements: One of the texts given is from a paper scrap titled "A List list of Things things that will be Needed Four Days From Now".needed four days from now".
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* LovingAShadow: That’s how Stone Telling views her mother’s low toward Terter Abhao. She never knew his people’s culture, so how could she know the kind of man he really was?
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* LovingAShadow: That’s how Stone Telling views her mother’s low love toward Terter Abhao. She never knew his people’s culture, so how could she know the kind of man he really was?
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* ArcNumber: The Kesh divide everything into Nine Houses. The Five Houses of Earth represent corporal things like Earth, human beings, domestic animals and plants. The Four Houses of the sky include things like generic groups, the dead, the unborn, and the fictional. All three numbers are therefore frequent in the books
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* ArcNumber: The Kesh divide everything into Nine Houses. The Five Houses of Earth represent corporal things like Earth, human beings, domestic animals and plants. The Four Houses of the sky include things like generic groups, the dead, the unborn, and the fictional. All three numbers are therefore frequent in the booksbook.
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* 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.
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''Always Coming Home'' is a 1985 novel by Creator/UrsulaKLeGuin. It describes a future. 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.
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.
!!''Always Coming Home'' contains examples of:
* AdamAndEvePlot: Subverted in one of the creation myths told. One world did rise from a brother and sister who were the only ones left from the previous one, but since it was incest, the new people were mad and destroyed themselves eventually.
* AdaptationExpansion: InUniverse. A particular genre in the Valley is a type of play where the author has only written some twenty lines around which any troupe can build a play of their own length and to their own taste.
* AfterTheEnd: With a good amount of the world poisoned and beaches full of styrofoam.
* 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.
* AnimalThemeNaming: The first names given to girls are often those of birds.
* ArcNumber: The Kesh divide everything into Nine Houses. The Five Houses of Earth represent corporal things like Earth, human beings, domestic animals and plants. The Four Houses of the sky include things like generic groups, the dead, the unborn, and the fictional. All three numbers are therefore frequent in the books
* 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.
* 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.
* BabyLanguage: Stone Telling remarks that as they went back home, her toddler daughter communicated with other toddlers in towns along the way far better than she herself did.
* BalancingDeathsBooks: The Brave Man is the story of a person who offered to die instead of his wife after she had a very difficult miscarriage.
* BearsAreBadNews: Like the story of Withy, who got clawed by one.
* BiggerIsBetterInBed: One humorous story has a girl impressed when she sees a particular guy peeing.
* BlameGame: The Dayao attempt to shift the blame upon each other when the war went badly for them.
* BlamingTheVictim: By the standards of Dayao, any woman without a proper escort is fair game who is asking for it.
* BlindSeer: Cave, the old woman from the story of Stone Telling.
* BloodForMortar: Some people in the Valley (and everyone in two of the towns) mixed some of a slaughtered animal's blood with clay, to be used later for making bricks.
* BreakingTheFourthWall: Pandora talking to the librarian is the most prominent example.
* CainAndAbel: The story of the Coyote and the human commander has his sons killing each other.
* CaliforniaCollapse: Not quite a collapse, but a lot of today’s structures are visible under the water.
* CassandraTruth: The Condor leader ignores and even punishes anyone who tries to tell him his armies cannot take on the whole world by themselves. That includes his own son.
* 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.
* CommonTongue: The TOK is used as either that or for the internet.
* {{Conlang}}: The language of Kesh has a considerable vocabulary given. The expanded edition also adds the syntax rules.
* CosyCatastrophe: Despite all the past and residual damage to Earth, people seem to be quite happy.
* CountryMouse: Stone Telling describes feeling off to the point of sickness in the Condor city. The Dayao people themselves are, according to her, also an example. They used to be nomadic people, and are still happiest when outside their city.
* CrazyCulturalComparison: A lot of the aspects of the Kesh culture are alien to us, most prominently their attitude to property and wealth. When Stone Telling describes the Condor people, with customs closer to a western society (a highly conservative one), she treats them as madmen.
* CreationMyth: A few are told by people in the book. It is unclear how much of it is tradition and how much is made up on the spot.
* DefenestrateAndBerate: One of the Kesh forms of divorce is a woman taking her husband’s things out of the house.
* DeliberateValuesDissonance: Kesh attitudes to sex, property and gender are considerably different from ours (wealth, for example, is determined by generosity instead of property).
* 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.
* DisappearedDad: Terter Abhao for North Owl.
* DisinheritedChild: The Condor to his son, to the point of imprisoning and then killing him.
* DivineBirds: For the Kesh, the birds are intermediaries between the Earth Houses and Sky houses. For the Dayao, a Condor is the sacred bird after which they are named.
* 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.
* DreamingOfThingsToCome: Stone Telling described a vision she had of [[spoiler:her father's corpse]]. When he shows up later, she believes her vision to be false, but later, when they must part ways [[spoiler:as she escapes the Dayao people]], she realizes a chance for it to come true will come soon.
* DrivenToSuicide:
** It is mentioned that a teenaged father in the Valley might be mocked to the point of exile or suicide.
** In "the Miller", the titular character jumps into his mill’s machinery once he realizes [[MyGodWhatHaveIDone what he did]].
* EyeScream: The story of Junco, who spent a day staring at the sun trying to learn the secrets of the universe.
* FacialHorror: Withy walked with a mask ever since her encounter with a bear.
* FamilyExtermination: After The Condor executes his son, he also executes his wives, concubines, children and slaves.
* FantasticRacism: The Dayao view all other people as non-human, fit only for conquest as per their religion. They are doing their best not to dwell upon cases when their commoner men (who ''are'' humans according to said religion) are ordered around by noble women (who ''aren't'')
* ForeverWar: The hostility in "Old Women Hating". No one remembers when it started or if there can be a point to it now.
* FromCataclysmToMyth: The Kesh are aware the world has been damaged by the actions of past humans, but aren’t exactly interested in knowing more.
* FutureImperfect: The data about the past is actually all there, but no one bothers to dig it up.
* GodEmperor: How the Dayao view their leader.
* GoodGirlsAvoidAbortion: The Dayao nobles would never consider an abortion, but the commoners are stated to have them more often than not. Definitely averted for the Kesh people, who are a complete pro-choice society (except for girls younger than eighteen, who are never allowed to become mothers). Stone Telling mentions having an abortion after a case of MaritalRapeLicense by her Dayao husband.
* GroinAttack:
** One poem has a story of a man whose penis was tired of constantly being forced to work, so it cut itself off and ran away.
** The Coyote cutting off a bear’s balls in one of the stories, and then a human commander doing it to himself.
* HeWhoFightsMonsters: For the Kesh, the mere fact that some youngsters have decided to replicate the Dayao idea of warriors and armies was extremely shameful for them.
* HeadTurnedBackwards: The most feared bogeyman of the Kesh is a tall humanoid with a head turned backwards. It is actually supposed to represent our current civilization, with its complete craziness which ruined the ecosystem.
* HidingBehindTheLanguageBarrier: In "The Trouble with the Cotton People", the traders bringing cotton to the valley claim their captain is the only person capable of speaking the language of the Cotton People, and speaks no other. [[spoiler:They are all Cotton People. The "captain" is some mentally challenged guy they found who cannot speak properly at all.]]
* 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.
* HoistByHisOwnPetard: In "Old Women Hating", the woman living upstairs attempts to set fire to the neighbor below by pouring down oil and igniting it. She is the only casualty of the fire.
* HornySailors: "The Trouble with the Cotton People" has the teller claiming he had a lot of problems with that at one point during his journey. Relief was problematic, since the Kesh people tend to be careful about the possibility of STD, which are very rare among them, but not in other places.
* HumansAreMorons: Our society, to the extent that it is remembered, is viewed as madmen.
* HumansAreWhite: Averted. Some people in the Valley do have white skin, and tradition claims them to be of supernatural origin (half-mermaids, basically).
* 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 sister and her husband making a lot of noise in their lovemaking every night.
* IntangibleTimeTravel: In "The Visionary", a vision of some strange people is described by the narrator. A footnote explains these were likely native Californian tribes which were forcibly relocated in the mid-nineteenth century.
* InterruptedIntimacy: Stone Telling describes how she traveled to another town in her childhood. Her cousins there tended to have fun at night by interrupting amorous teens.
* JustSoStory: One explaining why a certain family in one of the towns has white skin.
* KindlyVet: Striffen from "The Visionary" is described as one, healing horses and cattle and in some kind of empathic connection with them.
* 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.
* LaResistance: The people opposing the Dayao rule, both from conquered territories and commoners of the city.
* LanguageDrift: The language of the Kesh is unrecognizable to us nowadays. There are also mentions of differences accumulated over time.
* LittlestCancerPatient: "The Visionary" has the narrator marrying a man who has two sons, one of them vedet (a terminal illness akin to Alzheimer in symptoms but much more painful).
* TheLoinsSleepTonight: Stone Telling mentions that when she and her Dayao husband decided to have a child, it took them quite a bit of time due to the latter being both older and weary due to his work.
* LostInTranslation: A lot of aspects in Kesh language are hard to translate to us. Prominently, a double case is Stone Telling complaining that she has to use "reversal words" which sound ridiculous to Kesh speakers in order to properly describe the Dayao culture. However, the differences in question are things like status and wealth being determined by possessions rather than generosity, a difficulty completely lost to modern Western society, which is closer to the Dayao in that respect.
* LovingAShadow: That’s how Stone Telling views her mother’s low 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.
* TheMeaningOfLife: Bodo from "The Shouting Man, the Red Woman, and the Bears" asks a lot of questions on the subject.
* MeaningfulRename: People in the Valley tend to have three names throughout their lives; as children, as adults and as old people. The mother of Stone Telling was Willow as an adult, and once she broke up with Terter, demanded to be called by her childhood name, Towhee. It was considered an extremely wrong action which her daughter never accepted, and upon her death, she was mourned as Ashes. Stone Telling herself also had a fourth (or rather, second) name while living among the Dayao.
* MissingEpisode: InUniverse, the novel "Dangerous People" is missing its ending due to having been damaged in transit.
* 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.
* MistakenForPregnant: In "Dangerous People", Shamsha considers some action by Hwette to be a sign she is pregnant, but Hwette denies any such thing.
* MonsterClown: The White Clowns are the Bogeymen of the Kesh, appearing around the winter solstice festival.
* 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.
* NaiveNewcomer: Stone Telling has a lot of that when living among the Dayao. Her father, correspondingly, has his moments in the Valley.
* NeverLearnedToRead: The Dayao consider the acts of reading and writing to be sacred, parts of the act of Creation, so any commoner attempting to engage in either is punished severely. This causes a lot of confusion for Night Owl: among the Kesh, the only ones illiterate are those physically or mentally incapable of reading.
* NeverMyFault: Among the Dayao, the superiors and their orders are never at fault. Only the ones carrying the orders out are.
* NewChildLeftBehind: Stone Telling was such a child, daughter to a military commander passing through the Valley.
* NoodleImplements: One of the texts given is from a paper scrap titled "A List of Things that will be Needed Four Days From Now".
* 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.
* OffingTheOffspring: The Dayao ruler imprisons and later executes his son for disagreeing with him.
* 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).
* OrganAutonomy: One poem has a penis tired of constant activity cutting itself off and running away.
* OurMermaidsAreDifferent: "Shahugoten" tells the story of a girl who was born part fish and tended to fluctuate in that regard.
* 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.
* OverlyLongName: The houses in the towns tend to have long names which hardly anyone ever uses.
* PastoralScienceFiction: The Kesh have access to technology, but a lot of their food comes from foraging and low-tech agriculture.
* PlayingDoctor: It is mentioned sexual games are actually encouraged among the Valley kids, so that by the age of ten, they tend to be well knowledgeable about contraceptives.
* PopulationControl: The Kesh don't like large families. More than two kids is not appreciated (presumably this might be different in case of a population drop).
* PostApocalypticDog: A frequent trouble in the Valley. Ironically, domesticated dogs mainly serve the purpose of protecting against those. No child ever goes into the forest without at least one.
* PostPeakOil: To a degree which causes a lot of problems when the Dayao people try to fuel the bombers they build.
* PropheticFallacy: Stone Telling has a vision at one point of [[spoiler:her father's corpse]]. When he shows up later, she believes her vision to be false, but later, when he helps her [[spoiler: escape the Dayao people]], she realizes it must have been a vision of the future.
* ProudWarriorRaceGuy: The Dayao are that. Causes Terter Abhao a lot of trouble with Willow, for whom all his achievements and heroics are meaningless or childish.
* PuttingOnTheReich: The Dayao. Warlike conquerors, with youth parading through the street. An ArmchairMilitary GloriousLeader who is considered infallible and accepts no criticism, punishing anyone disagreeing. Attempts to take on every neighbor in sight instead of concentrating on one at a time. Racist ideology which considers them alone true humans. Obsession with AwesomeButImpractical superweapons at the expense of regular military.
* 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.
* SchizoTech: The Kesh have electricity and solar panels, a single steam train (pulled by horses when the weather is too dry to risk the engine starting a fire), internet access, and yet a lot of their technology and culture are at the level of pre-Columbian natives.
* ScrewThisImOuttaHere: Stone Telling describes how, when the Dayao start suffering defeats and foot shortages, a lot of their commoners start running away. She follows soon.
* SelfDisposingVillain: The Dayao collapse due to inability to maintain their AwesomeButImpractical bomber force.
* ShaggyDogStory: Common in a Valley genre called the Tabetupah.
* ShowWithinAShow: Anything from poems a few lines in length to a novel (a single chapter in the regular edition, almost complete in the expanded version).
* SignificantWardrobeShift: A person starts wearing proper clothing (instead of just covering the essentials) at puberty, and dyed clothing [[VirginityFlag upon taking on a sexual partner]].
* SolarPunk: The Kesh are an agrarian and foraging society, but they use quite a few solar panels.
* SpaceAmish: The Kesh principle of only using technology on a level they can easily maintain on their own is actually quite close to the Amish views.
* StarcrossedLovers:
** Terter Abhao and Willow, with him being a military commander from a society with very different values.
** The woman and the Wild Man from "At the Springs of Orlu".
** ''The Wedding Night at Chukulmas'' has the ghosts of two people who died before their wedding.
* StayInTheKitchen: The Dayao attitude on noblewomen is for them to be nothing but childbearers (although a noble concubine can be taken for pleasure exclusively) and never leave the house. This is a sharp contrast from the Kesh. There, if anything, women are the ones with the higher status.
* TeenPregnancy: Common among the Dayao, but very rare among the Kesh. Abortion is mandatory for them before eighteen, while a teenaged father might be mocked to the point of suicide.
* ThankYourPrey: It is considered necessary for a person to sing a song after killing an animal on a hunt. A shortened version (a single line) is required even for butchers. A ''super''short version (one word) is mandatory even when swatting a fly or [[PickedFlowersAreDead picking a flower]].
* 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.
* ThoseWilyCoyotes: The female coyote is the chief TricksterArchetype in the Kesh folklore.
* 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.
* 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.
* TragicStillbirth: Normally averted, since due to the leftover pollution, miscarriages and stillbirths are very common in the Valley. There are, however, poems in the extended edition which are sung in case of a stillbirth, and in "The Brave Man", the main plot is a woman being sick due to a very painful miscarriage.
* TrickedIntoEscaping: The imprisoned son of The Condor was killed after trying to escape due to being betrayed by the people who pretended to help him.
* UnusualEuphemism:
** "Living on the coast" and "Coming inland" are terms for the mandatory post-puberty chastity and taking on a partner, respectively.
** At the beginning of "Chanti", the people say the titular character is lucky to be marries to such a woman and "To plow and weed and tend and harvest that bit of ground, in the gardens of the night!"
** The Ginkgo tree is used as a synonym for homosexuality, due to the need to plant male and female trees far apart (the fruit are described by Wiki/TheOtherWiki to smell "like rancid butter or vomit").
* VirginityFlag: As a variant, taking on a sexual partner is the stage where a person starts wearing dyed clothing.
* WarIsHell: For Kesh, war is idiocy, at least on the scale they are familiar with it (a dozen people fighting another tribe over some offense). Stone Telling, however, who had lived with the warlike Dayao, has learned and describes the horrors of war in detail.
* WeWillHaveEuthanasiaInTheFuture: It is completely normal in The Valley, subject to proper discussion beforehand.
* {{Worldbuilding}}: A very thorough example. There are maps of both the Na Valley and a good portion of the rest of America, there are songs, poetry, folklore. Even food recipes.
* YouNeedToGetLaid: When Night Owl is sick in the Dayao city, a doctor says it is nothing a husband won't cure, in a matter very similar to old discussions about female hysteria.
* YoungerThanTheyLook: It is mentioned that Terter Abhao appeared to have aged prematurely the last time his daughter saw him.
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.
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.
!!''Always Coming Home'' contains examples of:
* AdamAndEvePlot: Subverted in one of the creation myths told. One world did rise from a brother and sister who were the only ones left from the previous one, but since it was incest, the new people were mad and destroyed themselves eventually.
* AdaptationExpansion: InUniverse. A particular genre in the Valley is a type of play where the author has only written some twenty lines around which any troupe can build a play of their own length and to their own taste.
* AfterTheEnd: With a good amount of the world poisoned and beaches full of styrofoam.
* 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.
* AnimalThemeNaming: The first names given to girls are often those of birds.
* ArcNumber: The Kesh divide everything into Nine Houses. The Five Houses of Earth represent corporal things like Earth, human beings, domestic animals and plants. The Four Houses of the sky include things like generic groups, the dead, the unborn, and the fictional. All three numbers are therefore frequent in the books
* 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.
* 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.
* BabyLanguage: Stone Telling remarks that as they went back home, her toddler daughter communicated with other toddlers in towns along the way far better than she herself did.
* BalancingDeathsBooks: The Brave Man is the story of a person who offered to die instead of his wife after she had a very difficult miscarriage.
* BearsAreBadNews: Like the story of Withy, who got clawed by one.
* BiggerIsBetterInBed: One humorous story has a girl impressed when she sees a particular guy peeing.
* BlameGame: The Dayao attempt to shift the blame upon each other when the war went badly for them.
* BlamingTheVictim: By the standards of Dayao, any woman without a proper escort is fair game who is asking for it.
* BlindSeer: Cave, the old woman from the story of Stone Telling.
* BloodForMortar: Some people in the Valley (and everyone in two of the towns) mixed some of a slaughtered animal's blood with clay, to be used later for making bricks.
* BreakingTheFourthWall: Pandora talking to the librarian is the most prominent example.
* CainAndAbel: The story of the Coyote and the human commander has his sons killing each other.
* CaliforniaCollapse: Not quite a collapse, but a lot of today’s structures are visible under the water.
* CassandraTruth: The Condor leader ignores and even punishes anyone who tries to tell him his armies cannot take on the whole world by themselves. That includes his own son.
* 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.
* CommonTongue: The TOK is used as either that or for the internet.
* {{Conlang}}: The language of Kesh has a considerable vocabulary given. The expanded edition also adds the syntax rules.
* CosyCatastrophe: Despite all the past and residual damage to Earth, people seem to be quite happy.
* CountryMouse: Stone Telling describes feeling off to the point of sickness in the Condor city. The Dayao people themselves are, according to her, also an example. They used to be nomadic people, and are still happiest when outside their city.
* CrazyCulturalComparison: A lot of the aspects of the Kesh culture are alien to us, most prominently their attitude to property and wealth. When Stone Telling describes the Condor people, with customs closer to a western society (a highly conservative one), she treats them as madmen.
* CreationMyth: A few are told by people in the book. It is unclear how much of it is tradition and how much is made up on the spot.
* DefenestrateAndBerate: One of the Kesh forms of divorce is a woman taking her husband’s things out of the house.
* DeliberateValuesDissonance: Kesh attitudes to sex, property and gender are considerably different from ours (wealth, for example, is determined by generosity instead of property).
* 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.
* DisappearedDad: Terter Abhao for North Owl.
* DisinheritedChild: The Condor to his son, to the point of imprisoning and then killing him.
* DivineBirds: For the Kesh, the birds are intermediaries between the Earth Houses and Sky houses. For the Dayao, a Condor is the sacred bird after which they are named.
* 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.
* DreamingOfThingsToCome: Stone Telling described a vision she had of [[spoiler:her father's corpse]]. When he shows up later, she believes her vision to be false, but later, when they must part ways [[spoiler:as she escapes the Dayao people]], she realizes a chance for it to come true will come soon.
* DrivenToSuicide:
** It is mentioned that a teenaged father in the Valley might be mocked to the point of exile or suicide.
** In "the Miller", the titular character jumps into his mill’s machinery once he realizes [[MyGodWhatHaveIDone what he did]].
* EyeScream: The story of Junco, who spent a day staring at the sun trying to learn the secrets of the universe.
* FacialHorror: Withy walked with a mask ever since her encounter with a bear.
* FamilyExtermination: After The Condor executes his son, he also executes his wives, concubines, children and slaves.
* FantasticRacism: The Dayao view all other people as non-human, fit only for conquest as per their religion. They are doing their best not to dwell upon cases when their commoner men (who ''are'' humans according to said religion) are ordered around by noble women (who ''aren't'')
* ForeverWar: The hostility in "Old Women Hating". No one remembers when it started or if there can be a point to it now.
* FromCataclysmToMyth: The Kesh are aware the world has been damaged by the actions of past humans, but aren’t exactly interested in knowing more.
* FutureImperfect: The data about the past is actually all there, but no one bothers to dig it up.
* GodEmperor: How the Dayao view their leader.
* GoodGirlsAvoidAbortion: The Dayao nobles would never consider an abortion, but the commoners are stated to have them more often than not. Definitely averted for the Kesh people, who are a complete pro-choice society (except for girls younger than eighteen, who are never allowed to become mothers). Stone Telling mentions having an abortion after a case of MaritalRapeLicense by her Dayao husband.
* GroinAttack:
** One poem has a story of a man whose penis was tired of constantly being forced to work, so it cut itself off and ran away.
** The Coyote cutting off a bear’s balls in one of the stories, and then a human commander doing it to himself.
* HeWhoFightsMonsters: For the Kesh, the mere fact that some youngsters have decided to replicate the Dayao idea of warriors and armies was extremely shameful for them.
* HeadTurnedBackwards: The most feared bogeyman of the Kesh is a tall humanoid with a head turned backwards. It is actually supposed to represent our current civilization, with its complete craziness which ruined the ecosystem.
* HidingBehindTheLanguageBarrier: In "The Trouble with the Cotton People", the traders bringing cotton to the valley claim their captain is the only person capable of speaking the language of the Cotton People, and speaks no other. [[spoiler:They are all Cotton People. The "captain" is some mentally challenged guy they found who cannot speak properly at all.]]
* 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.
* HoistByHisOwnPetard: In "Old Women Hating", the woman living upstairs attempts to set fire to the neighbor below by pouring down oil and igniting it. She is the only casualty of the fire.
* HornySailors: "The Trouble with the Cotton People" has the teller claiming he had a lot of problems with that at one point during his journey. Relief was problematic, since the Kesh people tend to be careful about the possibility of STD, which are very rare among them, but not in other places.
* HumansAreMorons: Our society, to the extent that it is remembered, is viewed as madmen.
* HumansAreWhite: Averted. Some people in the Valley do have white skin, and tradition claims them to be of supernatural origin (half-mermaids, basically).
* 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 sister and her husband making a lot of noise in their lovemaking every night.
* IntangibleTimeTravel: In "The Visionary", a vision of some strange people is described by the narrator. A footnote explains these were likely native Californian tribes which were forcibly relocated in the mid-nineteenth century.
* InterruptedIntimacy: Stone Telling describes how she traveled to another town in her childhood. Her cousins there tended to have fun at night by interrupting amorous teens.
* JustSoStory: One explaining why a certain family in one of the towns has white skin.
* KindlyVet: Striffen from "The Visionary" is described as one, healing horses and cattle and in some kind of empathic connection with them.
* 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.
* LaResistance: The people opposing the Dayao rule, both from conquered territories and commoners of the city.
* LanguageDrift: The language of the Kesh is unrecognizable to us nowadays. There are also mentions of differences accumulated over time.
* LittlestCancerPatient: "The Visionary" has the narrator marrying a man who has two sons, one of them vedet (a terminal illness akin to Alzheimer in symptoms but much more painful).
* TheLoinsSleepTonight: Stone Telling mentions that when she and her Dayao husband decided to have a child, it took them quite a bit of time due to the latter being both older and weary due to his work.
* LostInTranslation: A lot of aspects in Kesh language are hard to translate to us. Prominently, a double case is Stone Telling complaining that she has to use "reversal words" which sound ridiculous to Kesh speakers in order to properly describe the Dayao culture. However, the differences in question are things like status and wealth being determined by possessions rather than generosity, a difficulty completely lost to modern Western society, which is closer to the Dayao in that respect.
* LovingAShadow: That’s how Stone Telling views her mother’s low 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.
* TheMeaningOfLife: Bodo from "The Shouting Man, the Red Woman, and the Bears" asks a lot of questions on the subject.
* MeaningfulRename: People in the Valley tend to have three names throughout their lives; as children, as adults and as old people. The mother of Stone Telling was Willow as an adult, and once she broke up with Terter, demanded to be called by her childhood name, Towhee. It was considered an extremely wrong action which her daughter never accepted, and upon her death, she was mourned as Ashes. Stone Telling herself also had a fourth (or rather, second) name while living among the Dayao.
* MissingEpisode: InUniverse, the novel "Dangerous People" is missing its ending due to having been damaged in transit.
* 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.
* MistakenForPregnant: In "Dangerous People", Shamsha considers some action by Hwette to be a sign she is pregnant, but Hwette denies any such thing.
* MonsterClown: The White Clowns are the Bogeymen of the Kesh, appearing around the winter solstice festival.
* 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.
* NaiveNewcomer: Stone Telling has a lot of that when living among the Dayao. Her father, correspondingly, has his moments in the Valley.
* NeverLearnedToRead: The Dayao consider the acts of reading and writing to be sacred, parts of the act of Creation, so any commoner attempting to engage in either is punished severely. This causes a lot of confusion for Night Owl: among the Kesh, the only ones illiterate are those physically or mentally incapable of reading.
* NeverMyFault: Among the Dayao, the superiors and their orders are never at fault. Only the ones carrying the orders out are.
* NewChildLeftBehind: Stone Telling was such a child, daughter to a military commander passing through the Valley.
* NoodleImplements: One of the texts given is from a paper scrap titled "A List of Things that will be Needed Four Days From Now".
* 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.
* OffingTheOffspring: The Dayao ruler imprisons and later executes his son for disagreeing with him.
* 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).
* OrganAutonomy: One poem has a penis tired of constant activity cutting itself off and running away.
* OurMermaidsAreDifferent: "Shahugoten" tells the story of a girl who was born part fish and tended to fluctuate in that regard.
* 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.
* OverlyLongName: The houses in the towns tend to have long names which hardly anyone ever uses.
* PastoralScienceFiction: The Kesh have access to technology, but a lot of their food comes from foraging and low-tech agriculture.
* PlayingDoctor: It is mentioned sexual games are actually encouraged among the Valley kids, so that by the age of ten, they tend to be well knowledgeable about contraceptives.
* PopulationControl: The Kesh don't like large families. More than two kids is not appreciated (presumably this might be different in case of a population drop).
* PostApocalypticDog: A frequent trouble in the Valley. Ironically, domesticated dogs mainly serve the purpose of protecting against those. No child ever goes into the forest without at least one.
* PostPeakOil: To a degree which causes a lot of problems when the Dayao people try to fuel the bombers they build.
* PropheticFallacy: Stone Telling has a vision at one point of [[spoiler:her father's corpse]]. When he shows up later, she believes her vision to be false, but later, when he helps her [[spoiler: escape the Dayao people]], she realizes it must have been a vision of the future.
* ProudWarriorRaceGuy: The Dayao are that. Causes Terter Abhao a lot of trouble with Willow, for whom all his achievements and heroics are meaningless or childish.
* PuttingOnTheReich: The Dayao. Warlike conquerors, with youth parading through the street. An ArmchairMilitary GloriousLeader who is considered infallible and accepts no criticism, punishing anyone disagreeing. Attempts to take on every neighbor in sight instead of concentrating on one at a time. Racist ideology which considers them alone true humans. Obsession with AwesomeButImpractical superweapons at the expense of regular military.
* 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.
* SchizoTech: The Kesh have electricity and solar panels, a single steam train (pulled by horses when the weather is too dry to risk the engine starting a fire), internet access, and yet a lot of their technology and culture are at the level of pre-Columbian natives.
* ScrewThisImOuttaHere: Stone Telling describes how, when the Dayao start suffering defeats and foot shortages, a lot of their commoners start running away. She follows soon.
* SelfDisposingVillain: The Dayao collapse due to inability to maintain their AwesomeButImpractical bomber force.
* ShaggyDogStory: Common in a Valley genre called the Tabetupah.
* ShowWithinAShow: Anything from poems a few lines in length to a novel (a single chapter in the regular edition, almost complete in the expanded version).
* SignificantWardrobeShift: A person starts wearing proper clothing (instead of just covering the essentials) at puberty, and dyed clothing [[VirginityFlag upon taking on a sexual partner]].
* SolarPunk: The Kesh are an agrarian and foraging society, but they use quite a few solar panels.
* SpaceAmish: The Kesh principle of only using technology on a level they can easily maintain on their own is actually quite close to the Amish views.
* StarcrossedLovers:
** Terter Abhao and Willow, with him being a military commander from a society with very different values.
** The woman and the Wild Man from "At the Springs of Orlu".
** ''The Wedding Night at Chukulmas'' has the ghosts of two people who died before their wedding.
* StayInTheKitchen: The Dayao attitude on noblewomen is for them to be nothing but childbearers (although a noble concubine can be taken for pleasure exclusively) and never leave the house. This is a sharp contrast from the Kesh. There, if anything, women are the ones with the higher status.
* TeenPregnancy: Common among the Dayao, but very rare among the Kesh. Abortion is mandatory for them before eighteen, while a teenaged father might be mocked to the point of suicide.
* ThankYourPrey: It is considered necessary for a person to sing a song after killing an animal on a hunt. A shortened version (a single line) is required even for butchers. A ''super''short version (one word) is mandatory even when swatting a fly or [[PickedFlowersAreDead picking a flower]].
* 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.
* ThoseWilyCoyotes: The female coyote is the chief TricksterArchetype in the Kesh folklore.
* 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.
* 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.
* TragicStillbirth: Normally averted, since due to the leftover pollution, miscarriages and stillbirths are very common in the Valley. There are, however, poems in the extended edition which are sung in case of a stillbirth, and in "The Brave Man", the main plot is a woman being sick due to a very painful miscarriage.
* TrickedIntoEscaping: The imprisoned son of The Condor was killed after trying to escape due to being betrayed by the people who pretended to help him.
* UnusualEuphemism:
** "Living on the coast" and "Coming inland" are terms for the mandatory post-puberty chastity and taking on a partner, respectively.
** At the beginning of "Chanti", the people say the titular character is lucky to be marries to such a woman and "To plow and weed and tend and harvest that bit of ground, in the gardens of the night!"
** The Ginkgo tree is used as a synonym for homosexuality, due to the need to plant male and female trees far apart (the fruit are described by Wiki/TheOtherWiki to smell "like rancid butter or vomit").
* VirginityFlag: As a variant, taking on a sexual partner is the stage where a person starts wearing dyed clothing.
* WarIsHell: For Kesh, war is idiocy, at least on the scale they are familiar with it (a dozen people fighting another tribe over some offense). Stone Telling, however, who had lived with the warlike Dayao, has learned and describes the horrors of war in detail.
* WeWillHaveEuthanasiaInTheFuture: It is completely normal in The Valley, subject to proper discussion beforehand.
* {{Worldbuilding}}: A very thorough example. There are maps of both the Na Valley and a good portion of the rest of America, there are songs, poetry, folklore. Even food recipes.
* YouNeedToGetLaid: When Night Owl is sick in the Dayao city, a doctor says it is nothing a husband won't cure, in a matter very similar to old discussions about female hysteria.
* YoungerThanTheyLook: It is mentioned that Terter Abhao appeared to have aged prematurely the last time his daughter saw him.
