Heya heya
I’ve put off reading Le Guin’s Always Coming Home for years, because I knew I wasn’t ready for it. And then I knew that I was, and I loved it to bits, even though I keep waking up faintly depressed to remember that I don’t in fact live in a world like that. Never mind, one day we shall have our commonwealth by the sea, where we shall gather to talk about books and cook locally-grown produce and evolve effective consensus-based decision-making processes.
I poked around online for reviews, and found this one which had various interesting things to say, but mostly I wanted to respond to the “flaws” which the review identifies in order to clarify some of my own thinking about the book. Basically, I’m going to gratuitously pick out a few choice quotes and then have a grump about them. Screw consensus-making, let’s go with adversarial.
“the ‘machina ex machina’ of the City of Mind, a benevolent collection of machine intelligences which provides the Kesh and other peoples with all the positive benefits of science and technology (weather forecasts, global communication, etc.), while sparing them the need to devote resources to those ends.”
But this seems to me to be a very specific point about inventing or using technology just because we can, or because it’s there (no, thank you, I don’t actually want a mobile phone). If existing technology provides a sufficiency of information to enable the good life… then why churn out more? (*cough*ipods*cough) As for it being a bit of a fiddle – hey, her Utopia, she gets to set the rules.
“the straw-man patriarchal and authoritarian society of the Dayao/Condor [...] is too extreme to be an interesting contrast to the Kesh (except polemically)
Call me easily scared, but I found the internal logic of the Condor all too convincing. Besides, the utopian genre is all about holding up mirror images to reflect back upon either the utopia itself or upon our own world – this is a very common device in the genre (More’s Utopia does it as, indeed, does Le Guin’s own The Dispossessed). Also, the Condor are very carefully constructed into the flow of Always Coming Home. I’m avoiding saying ‘narrative flow’ because the book surely isn’t about linear narrative, and the Condor provide precisely the point of intersection between a holistic, hinging and ahistorical world, and a linear, progress-driven, historical world. The Condor are the means by which History threatens to intrude upon the Kesh (hence the emergence of the Warrior Lodge after the visit from the Condor). Stone Telling’s story is one of the very few bits of straightforward narrative in the book. (We only get one chapter of a single novel.)
“I can’t help thinking that things would be a little different if the Kesh were to face Julius Caesar and a single Roman legion, even with their technological inferiority.”
But don’t the Kesh have guns? I know they frown on hunting and so on, but wouldn’t a couple of well-judged shots over the top of the testudos make a pretty clear point? I’ll admit that this might start up the whole wheel of history again, Riddley Walker fashion, but isn’t part of the idea here that, as with the information which can be retrieved from the Exchanges, the Kesh are selective and pragmatic in their choices about which technologies they’ll use? Consistent with the “little country” in the Tao Te Ching, whose inhabitants also have machines which they choose not to use or be used by. (I’ve just been reading Le Guin’s translation of this.)
Oh well, just some reflections, and surely grossly unfair to the reviewer to pick these out of context and then bounce off them. But then I like the end of Tehanu too (reviewer doesn’t), so you can happily pay no attention to a word I say. My favourite bit in Always Coming Home, for what it’s worth, is the list of “generative metaphors” at the back of the book.
Thank you!
I’ve always wanted that review to start some kind of conversation, or elicit some kind of response.
I’ll write more later (its getting on for midnight) but I’d like to add one idea. For me, a utopia like Le Guin’s doesn’t have to have a “happy ending”: the merits of Kesh society are not dependent on its stability against external threats, so having the Condor attack them seems to me to be fighting the wrong battle. That is to say, leading a simpler, more “natural” life might be a worthwhile choice, even if it exposes one to extra risks.
As for the Kesh having guns, that’s the point of my comparison… The Condor may have war machines, but compared to historical armies of conquest they are psychologically feeble.
Combining these ideas, the unfortunate fact is that, historically, when “slow” societies have come in contacts with “fast” ones they have been destroyed, absorbed, or transformed. There are two ways to deal with this: one can change human nature (hinted at in Always Coming Home) or one can just accept it. 40,000 years of Australian Aboriginal history and culture are no less wonderful because European settlement and conquest has destroyed or transformed them in the last 200 years.
Hi Danny! How generous of you to take my post in such good spirit.
I don’t by any means disagree with your point that “slow” societies have historically been destroyed or consumed by “fast” societies. But I’m not sure I agree that, faced with this fact, there are only two choices: to change human nature or to accept the way things are. Surely it’s possible also to change the ways in which things are done, i.e. to work towards preventing this historical fact continuing to be historical fact. This seems to me to be what Always Coming Home sets out to demonstrate: the possibility of there being a better way of being in the world.
You’re right about the third option. But I think the third option is to create a new kind of society – which is the anarchist goal, after all.
I see Always Coming Home as a fictional ethnography, involving the creation of an imaginary “slow” society rather than something radically new. To give it a happy ending, Le Guin falls back instead on making fast societies weaker, through the hinted at genetic changes in human nature (which are presumably what underlie the weakness of the Condor).
But my review criticises Always Coming Home as utopian science fiction, which it only half-pretends to be. (If I were forced to classify it as fantasy or science fiction, I would call it fantasy, because I see it as essentially backwards-looking.)
As utopias, The Dispossessed seems to me much more honest: both about the compromises required and about the strengths of the contrasted society. Genetic changes in human nature are not the basis for any kind of political program – or at least not one Le Guin would actually endorse, I’m sure!