Always Coming Home
I'm reading Always Coming Home, Le Guin's multimedia post-apocalypse thing. It pulls in a lot of her influences, from cultures indigenous to the places she lived to East Asian religions, and while she acknowledged the dangers of wholesale cutting and pasting of real traditions and consequently had a pretty light touch, it's not for me to say whether the borrowing succeeds. What I will say is that, in a broad sense, it's a thoughtful take on this kind of setting and proof that we don't have to settle for anyone's rigid definition of what a novel is.
For genre history reasons way beyond the scope of this little post, a lot of science fiction and fantasy is preoccupied with the ways in which people can die, whether it's a story structured around its fight scenes or a game that makes most of the dying your fault. Le Guin's abiding concern, the thing she was a pervert for if you want to think of it that way, was the ways in which people can live. It's why The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness are captivating rather than merely relevant. It's why you can fairly describe the early Earthsea books as children's lit but can't dismiss them for this reason, especially considering what that series becomes. It's why she's one of my favorite writers, and it's what I'm talking about when I say you need to show me someone baking bread before I'll have the patience to hang with all your made-up words and wizards shooting fireballs. This isn't some kind of firm moral position--I click on a lot of bad guys in a lot of games--and I wouldn't say that every good story objectively must have this or any one priority, but it's a strong preference and why one of the games I recommend most often is about taking pictures.
Always Coming Home is a fragmentary account of how people live first and foremost, and it only occasionally bothers to remind you about such things as plot. It's mesmerizing and, I guess, indulgent? A whole book of only the good stuff.
Couple more things I want to make note of after finishing the book. The first is the attitude toward technology throughout, which is neither the total rejection you might expect from the premise nor full-on "we've always been cyborgs," but more like, we may be stuck to our tools, but we at least need to make sure this relationship is symbiotic:
If you don't teach machines and horses to do what you want in their way they'll teach you to do what they want in your way.
In a State, even a democracy, where power is hierarchic, how can you prevent the storage of information from becoming yet another source of power to the powerful--another piston in the great machine?
Speaking of hierarchic states, there's a section soon after this that's all about how, while groups organized in this way may seem threateningly efficient, they're ineffective when surrounded and outnumbered by people with no interest in living like they do--they're shortsighted and inflexible, they have no real allies because nobody shares their entirely self-centered goals, and they can't dominate through superior weapons without a supply chain. It's not a new idea, and Le Guin had been playing around with anarchism in her fiction for a while at that point, but it's a nice alternative to edgy post-apocalypse stories in which the biggest winners are warrior-heroes blasting their way through wastelands populated by target practice dummies.