TBH the culture seems to me an example of typically American puritan hedonistic and fundamentalist world-stance where further technological knowledge and research, and systematic and mathematical thought, are unnecessary, and perhaps even bad, for human flourishing. Everything we need to know has already been worked out. Leave exploration to machines. The opposite of the typically American puritan hedonism of Star Trek, where knowledge and research are the apex of human flourishing. Pay no attention to the Borg.

What they share is an absence of descriptions of functional politics that does not pose an existential threat to itself, or protagonists whose politics lead to social change without revolution. I think that RPGs, even when they present conflicted social interactions, likewise have difficulty including the dynamic communal and social compromises that characterise most of us humans most of the time. Why is it so difficult to describe, and design for, an unending play of compromise and politics? If you have played at this, how did it go?

On World-Building:

"To make something is to invent it, to discover it, to uncover it, like Michelangelo cutting away the marble that hid the statue. Perhaps we think less often of the proposition reversed, thus: To discover something is to make it. As Julius Caesar said, "The existence of Britain was uncertain, until I went there."... as far as Rome... is concerned, Caesar invented (invenire, "to come into, to come upon") Britain. He made it be, for the rest of the world."

"...What artists do is make particularly skillful selection of fragments of cosmos, unusually useful and entertaining bits chosen and arranged to give an illusion of coherence and duration amidst the uncontrollable streaming of events. An artist makes the world her world. An artist makes her world the world. For a little while. For as long as it takes..."

Ursulas words in the essay World Making echo my own feelings about world buidling - that invented worlds are something we build from things we already know, but cleverly assembled to make them look new and different. When I was a child, we had a large box of lego and space lego. I would sit for hours making things from the box. Then I would take the thing I made (usually a space ship or other kind of vehicle) into another room in the house - away from the box - and take that thing apart. Then I'd use the same pieces - all of them - to make something completely different.

World building seems similar. We pull things from the box to make a subset of tools, then use those tools to make worlds. We never use the whole box.

About Middle Earth she says: "At the centre of the vast landscapes and long travels is the Shire, and the Shire is unmistakably a real place, a real center of the world. A real place, but a lost time, and therefore mythologized. It is the rural England of Tolkien's childhood, inhabited by Hobbits. The hobbits, of course, behave more like ordinary Brits than the British do. They are the British, on a child's scale, and as perceived by the yearning, teasing, forgiving, loving eye of a man recalling the golden age and it's population of half-mythic and totally earth Proudfoots - ProudFEET - Hornblowers, Bolgers, and Bagginses. And so, though only a little place on the north edge of all the important countries, it is from the Shire that the heroes set out travelling, and to it that they come home. There and Back Again. It is the centre of the book, the middle of Middle-earth. From it, I think, originally radiates the extraordinary reality of the work: the reality of passion, the exile's passionate love for a world known and loved and lost."

(My imagined UKLG essay on the remembrance and world-building of Trump reads very differently).

On Cultural Appropriation

Several of the essays made me wonder what Le Guin would have thought of cultural appropriation. In the essay Indian Uncles she tells us: "Here we run into the moral problem we storytellers share with you anthropologists: the exploitation of real people. People should not use other people." And yet, I don't feel I understand her any better. She did draw on other people and cultures in her fiction. Did she use them?

On Belief and Roleplaying Games

"Belief is a queer business. The other person's idea is a "belief", but your idea is the truth, the way things really are." She goes on to talk about native hunting, and how the hunters would prepare themselves by performing the rituals that a deer that was about to die would want performed. And she concludes: "So a hunter who came back emptyhanded didn;t say, "I couldn't shoot a deer." He said, "No deer was willing to die for me. This point of view reverses things. It turns the world inside out. All of a sudden, you see the world not from outside, but from inside."

So, as a cultural roleplayer, that's interesting to me. This is a different thought process - like the notion in Tekumel that a 'noble action' is an action that's in accordance with one's idiom, rather than in keeping with a cultural code.

And here I think we come to a major misunderstanding of Le Guin's. I have heard that she would never allow Earthsea to become a world in which to roleplay. If this is true, I think its because she saw roleplay as battle, as D&D, as a vehicle to fight things and take their stuff. She never saw it as a tool by which a player could hop inside a world to look at it from within - and maybe (if we take @BarnerCobblewood 's point in another thread - she was right not to trust us.

On Utopia:

UKLG quotes Robert C. Elliott: “Utopia is the application of man’s reason and his will to the myth [of the Golden Age], man’s effort to work out imaginatively what happens–or might happen–when the primal longings embodied in the myth confront the principle of reality. In this effort man no longer merely dreams of a divine state in some remote time: he assumes the role of creator.”

Then she goes on to explain: "Now, the Golden Age, or Dream Time, is remote only from the rational mind. It is not accessible to euclidean reason; but on the evidence of all myth and mysticism, and the assurance of every participatory religion, it is, to those with the gift or discipline to perceive it, right here, right now. Whereas it is of the very essence of the rational or Jovian utopia that it is not here and not now. It is made by the reaction of will and reason against, away from, the here-and-now, and it is, as More said in naming it, nowhere. It is pure structure without content; pure model; goal. That is its virtue. Utopia is uninhabitable. As soon as we reach it, it ceases to be utopia. As evidence of this sad but ineluctable fact, may I point out that we in this room, here and now, are inhabiting utopia."

There is much more on the nature of Utopia in the essay called A Non-Euclidian View of California as a Cold Place to Be. My take-way is that Utopia is different things to different people, which means it is perforce a compromise. We're living that compromise right now! Welcome to Utopia!

Further into the essay, she talks about Levi Strauss and post-scarcity:

Levi-Strauss is about to make his distinction between the “hot” societies, which have appeared since the Neolithic Revolution, and in which “differentiations between castes and between classes are urged without cease, in order that social change and energy may be extracted from them,” and the “cold” societies, self-limited, whose historical temperature is pretty near zero.

The relevance of this beautiful piece of anthropological thinking to my subject is immediately proven by Levi-Strauss himself, who in the next paragraph thanks Heaven that anthropologists are not expected to predict man’s future, but says that if they were, instead of merely extrapolating from our own “hot” society, they might propose a progressive integration of the best of the “hot” with the best of the “cold.”

If I understand him, this unification would involve carrying the Industrial Revolution, already the principal source of social energy, to its logical extreme: the completed Electronic Revolution. After this, change and progress would be strictly cultural and, as it were, machine-made.

“With culture having integrally taken over the burden of manufacturing progress, society…, placed outside and above history, could once more assume that regular and as it were crystalline structure, which the surviving primitive societies teach us is not antagonistic to the human condition.”

The last phrase, from that austere and somber mind, is poignant.

As I understand it, Levi-Strauss suggests that to combine the hot and the cold is to transfer mechanical operational modes to machines while retaining organic modes for humanity. Mechanical progress; biological rhythm. A kind of super-speed electronic yang train, in whose yin pullmans and dining cars life is serene and the rose on the table does not even tremble. What worries me in this model is the dependence upon cybernetics as the integrating function. Who’s up there in the engineer’s seat? Is it on auto? Who wrote the program old Nobodaddy Reason again? Is it another of those trains with no brakes?

It may simply be the bad habits of my mind that see in this brief utopian glimpse a brilliant update of an old science-fiction theme: the world where robots do the work while the human beings sit back and play. These were always satirical works. The rule was that either an impulsive young man wrecked the machinery and saved humanity from stagnation, or else the machines, behaving with impeccable logic, did away with the squashy and superfluous people. The first and finest of the lot, E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” ends on a characteristic double chord of terror and promise: the machinery collapses, the crystalline society is shattered with it, but outside there are free people–how civilized, we don’t know, but outside and free.

I'm also reminded of Morlocks and Eloi. And of Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

And did this question of UKLG's vision of the future come up in another thread? Here's an answer, of sorts. This was written in 1982, not long before Vernor Vinge spoke of the Technological Singularty as a process that was already underway.

One need not smash one’s typewriter and go bomb the laundromat, after all,because one has lost faith in the continuous advance of technology as the way towards utopia. Technology remains, in itself, an endless creative source. I only wish that I could follow Levi-Strauss in seeing it as leading from the civilization that turns men into machines to “the civilization that will turn machines into men.” 31 But I cannot. I do not see how even the almost ethereal technologies promised by electronics and information theory can offer more than the promise of the simplest tool: to make life materially easier, to enrich us. That is a great promise and gain! But if this enrichment of one type of civilization occurs only at the cost of the destruction of all other species and their inorganic matrix of earth, water, and air, and at increasingly urgent risk to the existence of all life on the planet, then it seems fairly clear to me that to count upon technological advance for anything but technological advance is a mistake. I have not been convincingly shown, and seem to be totally incapable of imagining for myself, how any further technological advance of any kind will bring us any closer to being a society predominantly concerned with preserving its existence; a society with a modest standard of living, conservative of natural resources, with a low constant fertility rate and a political life based upon consent; a society that has made a successful adaptation to its environment and has learned to live without destroying itself or the people next door. But that is the society I want to be able to imagine–I must be able to imagine, for one does not get on without hope.

"The books are on the shelves, and all the electronic brains are full of memories... everything is in little bits." Does this mean discrete packets, or literally bits, as in 'bits and bytes'? Both?

"Many as we are, there's still too much to carry. We keep breeding to bear civilization forward, but they keep dying. There are not too many of them, only of us." Who is 'them' and who is 'us' in this context? Them being the Kesh, I assume. But 'us' seems to be other humans - outplanet humans? Not the City of Mind, since she seems to consider them to be 'other'.

"I have my own ideas about what's in the bottom of the box." Pandora's box is meant. Why is the land of the Kesh a pandora's box? What's in the bottom?

"No hurry, take your time. Here, take it, please. I give it to you, it's yours." Slow fiction?

LeGuin's story, like Tolkien's, is of a travel-quest that leaves and returns home, is divided into three parts that can be read straight through, but are presented with gaps. But in her story our protagonist does not cover vast distances, although her trip takes a much longer time, and what evil she finds in the world turns out to be immanent and local, not transcendent and greater than the world (there is a transcendent, but it is uninterested in governing human affairs). Unlike Frodo our protagonist knows from the beginning that she is a hybrid of two cultures (Frodo is all of one piece, but the Ring changes that). But like Frodo, she is not counted among the great, and her people are unimportant in the councils of rulers. She resides among both immanences, and finally concludes that one is ill and the other healthy, and unlike Frodo is not engaged to destroy either.

Like LOTR,_ ACH has extensive apparatus and appendices written by a scholarly contemporary of the present reader, and contains a lot of literary material not directly relevant to the story. It also contains far more visual cues than Tolkien, although this seems to me more due to technological advancements than any neglect on Tolkien's part. And I still treasure my Poems and Songs of Middle Earth record with Swann. But both Tolkien's and LeGuin's works are principally grounded in words, whereas the MCU is grounded in pictures with a few words.

However ACH has been (so far) less influential that both LOTR and MCU. I think that lack of influence is because of the absence of the emotional jolt of ressentiment provided by the inclusion of Manichaen themes.

I think we might have good conversation on these, and similar of topics.

I also thought this might be a good book to read now because of its thematic treatment of the relation between scientific knowledge and control, and differing outcomes (e.g. the Valleys' minimal use of the knowledge storehouse, the presumed collapse of the Condor due to misuse of the knowledge storehouse), and the costs involved for different peoples. This is tied to illness, and the place weakness should occupy in producing a healthy society. Since this is a plague year when hard limits on the strength of our systems and knowledge to work for our benefit have been revealed, I presume that these issues are at the forefront of all our thoughts.

Has anyone ever tried to play a game where the most powerful force is not a person, but a sequence of events? (Grey Ranks maybe?) Have you ever forced or been forced to play situations which cannot be beat, but after defeat the characters must continue (I'm not talking about railroading). Or have villains ever changed so as to no longer be monsters? How have you, or might you, approach getting situations like these to work? (I don't think it works in this book, but why it doesn't niggles at me) Perhaps you think this would make a terrible idea for play. Whatever responses, I'm interested.

Not really on topic, but I'd also like to hear of anyone's experience with lockdown and their play. Do you think that this will change how people choose their entertainment? Will it have a long-term influence on gaming, or will the industry be able to return to the recipes it has sued up to now? For example, I know that I am seeing a lot more discussion of 'virtual tabletops,' and their capacity to help or hinder play.

As of today we have (supposedly) completed reading Always Coming Home. I don't have a good read on how many of us are reading the book, but I think we are only about a half-dozen (Half-dozen indeed! Vulgar expression), so I thought that we should only have a few dicsussion threads so the conversation doesn't become too fractured. This thread is to hear what we thought of the book in general. The downside of course is that we might meander aimlessly through the Valley, but generally it seems the weather is clement and the scenery nice, as is the company, so I expect it will be worthwhile nonetheless.

I will post my comments after I have essayed a couple of other gambits (Why didn't the Kesh play chess?). I encourage everyone else to likewise post any discussion topics they might have.

Anyway, we have gotten to a big reveal, and the process of getting there was, for me during my first read, winding, twisted, tortuous. Ambitious is another adjective that came to mind. I find ACH reflects the people, who would have never made this book. Look forward to hearing from everyone, and I encourage anyone who wants to start their own discussion thread.