Lungstrum Smalls's Reviews > Always Coming Home

I've found in the past decade or so that my hope for a better future gets further and further away. Not the hope itself, that is, but the date in which I think something more beautiful will really emerge. After reading a book about the 5 Great Extinctions I found that my hope took root in some time after the next one, when the cockroaches have morphed into butterflies and the humans who've survived remember nothing of capitalism and patriarchy. And this is about the spot where Always Coming Home is placed.

It's a utopia I'd actually want to live in, where people take things slow: even the proper nouns take a long time to say. Here ceremony is calcified just enough to give meaning, but not enough to lock people into destructive patterns. In this place humans are animals and proud of it. It's not perfect, and wouldn't want to be.

Set aside your other Le Guin, especially those more clunky political/anthropological reads (like the Dispossessed), and dive into this world. If you have the patience (which I did not always myself, to be honest).