Ursula’s father was the renowned anthropologist A.L. Kroeber who is best known for his work on Western Native American Indians. He worked extensively with Ishi, the last survivor of the Yana Native American Indian group whose life is collected in the books Ishi in Two Worlds, written by Theodora Kroeber, and Ishi in Three Centuries, co-edited by Karl Kroeber and Clifton Kroeber. In her short essay “Indian Uncles”, Ursula K. Le Guin describes the fact that she never met Ishi and instead describes her relationship with Juan Dolores and Robert Spott, a Papago and Yurok respectively, and how they influenced her world-view. Le Guin, Ursula K.; Barton, Todd; Chodos-Irvine, Margaret; Hersh, George (27 February 2001). Always Coming Home (2001ed.). ISBN 9780520227354– via Google Books. Like much of Le Guin's work, Always Coming Home follows Native American themes. According to Richard Erlich, [8] " Always Coming Home is a fictional retelling of much in A. L. Kroeber's [Ursula's father] monumental Handbook of the Indians of California." There are also some elements retrieved from her mother's The Inland Whale ( Traditional narratives of Native California), such as the importance of the number nine, and the map of the Na Valley which looks like the Ancient Yurok World. [9] There are also Taoist themes: the heyiya-if looks like the taijitu, and its hollow center (the "hinge") is like the hub of the wheel as described in the Tao Te Ching. Le Guin had described herself "as an unconsistent Taoist and a consistent un-Christian". [10]

Aliens Surfing on Arizona Bay: California’s Uneasy Relationship with SFF” by Leah Schnelbach, Tor.com (10 June 2014) Self-Disposing Villain: The Dayao collapse due to inability to maintain their Awesome, but Impractical bomber force. Midway through her career, Le Guin embarked on one of her most detailed, impressive literary projects, a novel that took more than five years to complete. Blending story and fable, poetry, artwork, and song, Always Coming Home is this legendary writer’s fictional ethnography of the Kesh, a people of the far future living in a post-apocalyptic Napa Valley. Defenestrate and Berate: One of the Kesh forms of divorce is a woman taking her husband's things out of the house. Humans Are White: Averted. Some people in the Valley do have white skin, and tradition claims them to be of supernatural origin (half-mermaids, basically).The names in Le Guin's novel are descriptive because they not only name the characters, but they also describe the characters' personalities or circumstances in life. Pandora, for example, is the scientist who puts the entire collection of artifacts from the Kesh society together. However, Pandora was also the name of the first woman, according to Greek legend, who released all the evil in the world. The name, Pandora, also means "gift." Pandora, the editor in Always Coming Home, is keenly aware of the historical significance of her name. The names of both the Kesh and Condor characters are metaphoric as well. Pandora admits near the end of the novel that she has been using the English "meanings" of the Keshian and Condorian names rather than their real spellings Le Guin does this for two reasons: one, she wants her readers to connect with her characters; and two, she wants her characters' names to reflect what her characters do.

The Loins Sleep Tonight: 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.Our Mermaids Are Different: "Shahugoten" tells the story of a girl who was born part fish and tended to fluctuate in that regard. The book might seem to be something other than or more than a novel. Although billed as such, it, more than other Le Guin science fiction, stands somewhere between genres. It is not “philosophical fiction” or “anthropological fiction”—or rather, it is an example of both and neither. It refuses categories, embraces all, philosophizes and practices philosophy at the same time that it tells a story, makes up characters, describes a society. It is a complete ethnography; at the same time that the reader knows that the Kesh do not exist, he knows their existence more completely than any group studied in cultural anthropology. Le Guin, like other practitioners of speculative fiction or philosophy-fiction, believes in the potentiality of fiction for the discovery of cognitive and ethical truths. She uses the form and structure of her work, as well as its content, to pose problems of truth, knowledge, and value, and the form of the work itself proffers a solution. Not Quite the Right Thing: 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. Richard Patteson, "Le Guin's Earthsea Trilogy: The Psychology of Fantasy," in The Scope of the Fantastic—Culture Biography Themes, Children's Literature, edited by Robert Collins and Howard Pearce, Greenwood Press, 1985, pp. 239-48. Higher Understanding Through Drugs: 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.

Bernardo, Susan M.; Murphy, Graham J. (2006). Ursula K. Le Guin: A Critical Companion (1sted.). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-33225-8. Explores how various twentieth-century women writers have used nature as a literary device. Murphy then compares these ideas to the literary theories of Mikhail M. Bakhtin. Mood Whiplash: "Chandi", a play which has a man's fortune reversed like that of Job (a comparison actually made in some editions). Rite-of-Passage Name Change: 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. Bernard Selinger, " Always Coming Home: The Art of Living," in his Le Guin and Identity in Contemporary Fiction, University of Michigan Press, 1988, pp. 127-47.Mistaken for Gay: 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. A discussion of a selection of the novels used as texts in a course on language and science fiction taught by Hardman at the University of Florida. Novels included works by Nalo Hopkinson, Ursula Le Guin, and Elizabeth Moon. The relevance of each novel to the subject matter is included with its bibliographical citation. In 1985 in Ursula’s home in the Napa Valley, Elinor Armer and Ursula K. Le Guin dreamt up an archipelago of islands – the Islands of the Uttermost Parts – where music was used for purposes beyond listening and was even more essential than it is in our world. Le Guin wrote the words describing each island and Elinor scored them; both drew maps and spoke the poems. The musical excerpt used in the programme describes the island The Pheromones, where “music is sex (scored only)” and we can hear Ursula describe the island The Antioriental Shores, where “music is shadow (spoken only)”. Just as her science fiction classic The Left Hand of Darkness envisioned a world in which gender and sexuality were fluid, so Always Coming Home imagines a world in which its human people — highly sophisticated and technological in many ways — dance their world and tread on it lightly. It is a world in which women and men dance together as equals and animals are the other people who live in this valley. Utopia: Discussed, especially in the Framing Device when Pandora talks with a Kesh woman and complains about how "utopians" are a bother. The Kesh are at least partially In Harmony with Nature, 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 cruelty.