Always Coming Home
Ursula K Le Guin
University of California Press
February 2001
ISBN: 0-520-22735-2
It’s easy to see the “OA relevance” of the works of Iain Banks, or Alastair Reynolds. These are authors who were fundamental inspirations for us. Similarly, one can read works by Neal Asher, and read stories which explore many of the same concerns we explore in our writings.
There are, however, short stories, novels, and game settings which don’t immediately appear to have much for the afictionado of transhumanist SF — but, on closer examination, turn out to have interesting ideas to mull over.
I think of these as “unexpected voices”. From time to time, we’ll bring some of them to your attention.
Our first unexpected voice comes from Ursula K Le Guin. Always Coming Home is considered, by many, to be one of her finest works. It is a book in which her talents were given free reign; it is often spoken of as being her finest worldbuilding effort to date. But at first glance, it hardly seems related to our subgenre at all:
Much of the book is concerned with explaining the culture, lands and world of a fictional people called the Kesh. They live in a mediterranean-climate river valley in northern California. The world is one of the far future, some thousands of years from now, in which natural and man-made disasters have devastated human civilzation as we understand it. People are now rural and parochial, the old industrial era now no more than legend and bad memory.
The detail of the setting is astounding. The songs, art, technology, beliefs, rituals etc. of the Kesh are all treated with. Their culture is based around a metaphorical conception of the world, which is far too complex to explain here (read, and re-read, the book). It takes a while to understand the Kesh as their society is so unlike our industrial capitalist one. They do have a strong Native American flavour, but think Iroquois rather than Apache.
The novel itself, which is actually just the longest of a number of stories, serves to illustrate the setting by way of the learning of the central character and the contrast with a very different culture in the Kesh’s world.
A far future setting, but postapocalyptic, agrarian, “parochial”. A fine exercise in sustained worldbuilding, by all accounts, but it hardly seems the stuff of OA. So why do I offer this book, describing a human culture which is unabashedly low-tech, have an unexpected transhumanist voice? It’s not so much the Kesh, but one of their neighbors:
Some eleven thousand sites all over the planet were occupied by independent, self-contained, self-regulating communities of cybernetic devices or beings — computers with mechanical extensions. This network of intercommunicating centers formed a single entity, the City of Mind.
Yaivkach meant both the sites or centers and the whole network or entity. Most of the sites were small, less than an acre, but several huge desert Cities served as experimental stations and manufacturing centers or contained accelerators, launching pads, and so on. All City facilities were underground and domed, to obviate damage to or from the local environment. It appears that an ever-increasing number were located on other planets or bodies of the solar system, in satellites, or in probes voyaging in deep space.
The business of the City of Mind was, apparently, the business of any species or individual: to go on existing.
Its existence consisted essentially in information.
Its observable activity was entirely related to the collection, storage, and collation of data, including the historical records of cybernetic and human populations back as far as material was available from documentary or archaeological evidence; description and history of all life forms on the planet, ancient and current; physical description of the material world on all levels from the subatomic through the chemical, geological, biological, atmospheric, astronomical, and cosmic, in the historical, current, and predictive modes; pure mathematics; mathematical description and prediction derived from data in statistical form; exploration and mapping of the interior of the planet, the depths and superfices of the continents and seas, other bodies in the solar system including the sun, and an expanding area of near interstellar space, research and development of technologies ancillary to the collection, storage, and interpretation of data; and the improvement and continuous enhancement of the facilities and capacities of the network as a whole — in other words, conscious, self-directed evolution. …
Evidently it was in the interest of the City to maintain and foster the diversity of forms and modes of existence which made up the substance of the information which informed their existence — I apologise for the tautology but find it inevitable under the circumstances. Everything was grist to the Mind’s mill; therefore they destroyed nothing. Neither did they foster anything. They seem not to have interfered in any way with any other species. …
The City had no relation to plant life at all, except as it was the subject of their observation, a source of data. Their relation to the animal world was similarly restricted. Their relation to the human species was similarly restricted, with one exception: communication, the two-way exchange of information. …
Computer terminals, each linked to nearby ground or satellite Cities and hence to the entire vast network, were located in human communities worldwide. Any settled group of fifty or more people qualified for an Exchange, which was installed at the request of the human community by City robots, and maintained by both robot and human inspection and repair…
Now that could almost be an Encyclopedia Galactica entry, couldn’t it?
There is very little overt interaction with the City of Mind in Always Coming Home. But it is an interesting exercise to reread this work and contemplate what manner of observers, drones, subtle machines might well be sprinkled throughout the lands of the Kesh. How would they ever know, if the City didn’t tell them?
Always Coming Home offers the careful reader a chance to contemplate how the interaction between a post Singularity culture and a “reservation” might look. As such, it might well offer inspiration for authors who are contemplating similar interactions, between high S>>1 entities and lower tech polities. I also note that the lavish, careful attention to detail in this work make it a model of consistent worldbuilding.
The book itself is constructed almost like an anthropologist’s case study, a collage of observations, stories, essays, and sketches. As such, it’s not a particularly easy read; not likely to be tossed off in one session. But if one has bits of time, here and there, this “unexpected voice” has a great deal going for it.
More about the reviewer, Bill Ernoehazy, here.
I do like Always Coming Home; it seems to describe a workable version of human society which runs in parallel with an AI society, but the two have little contact.
If human society can flourish in a galaxy dominated by artificial intelligence, this work seems to provide one model which would work.