(Originally posted at trenchkamen.livejournal.com in 2014)

Things played out much as hand-wringing intellectuals predicted: the sea levels rose, industrial society collapsed, and pollutants of the industrial age wreck ecological havoc thousands of years after their use. An anthropologist travels into this far future to study the Native American-esque Kesh, who inhabit a valley in what is now Northern California called the Na. This is the collection of her interviews with the people of the valley, their stories, their customs, and their myths. Humans long ago colonized the distant stars but that age ebbed, the satellites and computers left from that age are artifacts, and the agrarian Kesh regard that age as a long, long ago of myth of fantastic and horrible machines, a warning of the consequences of excess. Indeed the society runs by an eco-feminist back-to-earth model, and population levels have dropped to levels a fraction of what they were, as birth rates are controlled, and there is a prodigious number of stillbirths and severe defects, caused, they assume, by the long legacy of industrial toxins that have worked their way up the food chain. But the Valley of the Na is not the only civilization, and peace is not the only ideology.

I’m surprised this book was published, not because of any lack of quality, but because it is a portfolio or compendium of  myths, notes, short stories, anecdotes, and anthropological observations of the Kesh civilization, fragmented by a main narrative consisting of maybe a third of the book. By this point LeGuin had enough credibility in the publishing world to dump whatever parcel of notes she wanted published on an editor’s desk and assume it would be printed with a minimum of interference, and I am glad they took the chance and published it. In this way it reminds me of somebody’s world-building notebook. And that is why I am so impressed with how LeGuin pulled this off–she tells, not shows, the majority of the book, breaking a proven rule of good storytelling, and yet avoids the feeling that somebody has cornered you and is telling you about their OCs and this novel they’re working on. That form of ‘storytelling’ is usually tedious at best and dull. Indeed, she takes what is usually a lazy, unartful way of conveying a story, and makes it a delight to read. The difficulty in a story comes in actually writing it down, not just jotting down notes as they come to you, but I’ve found her notes a real treat. And there is a cohesiveness and internal consistency that comes from revision and rumination.

No, I suppose that’s not totally it. She is telling, certainly, but in a subtle way–there is a lot of showing within the telling, a lot of innuendo, and a lot left unexplained. You can extrapolate a key component of the entire world from one offhand comment. It would be an insult to her artistry to imply there is nothing to intuit from her notes.

She also takes a tired, preachy genre–post-apocalyptic, post-industrial far future–and navigates it with skill. Here I won’t say with subtlety, not at all–it is clear who the ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ are, and what the ‘right’ course of action is–but it is skillful, and enjoyable to the bleeding heart progressive, because it vindicates unambiguously a lot of the ideals. And that is one thing I found a little flat–there is no real moral relativism. Sure, we can argue that the Kesh deal with hunting and death in a way that acknowledges paradoxes, etc, but within the scope of the book as a whole it is blatant which civilization is Ideal and which is Fallen, the Fallen being a facsimile of the militaristic empire-building we see in the industrialized world, on a bad day, when we’re in a very bad mood, and all things are quite black-and-white. Indeed, one may say this resembles reality in of itself–sometimes a situation really is quite one-sided, and reality does not require villains to be complex, as a narrative does, because reality does not require ‘credibility’–and one must remember the Dayo civilization is described by a Kesh woman who was held prisoner there. The report of their society is filtered through her perceptions.

So, if this isn’t a epic, multifaceted look at a clash of civilizations, why bother reading it? On balance it seems like a masturbatory collection of notes for the eco-liberal. I argue that the notes on the Kesh contain enough interesting inversions of current thought to make reading about their civilization, in itself, interesting. Not moralistic inversions, per se, but inversions of archetypes and interpretations of the natural world. There is a rich mythology here, in the truest sense of the word. In a way the complexity of the society is flattened by comparing it to the militaristic Dayo; Kesh seemed far more complex before that comparison was made. Perhaps I am extrapolating the simplicity of the Dayo culture to extend to all cultures in that world, but the attempt at illustrating the Kesh culture through this stark contrast made the society seem less fully realized, if anything. Maybe this is just a personal prejudice. Maybe not enough of the Dayo society was explored to make it feel like a true civilization in its own right and not a horrible community that exists only to serve as foil to the peaceful Kesh. It would be simplistic to say in all circumstances when it comes to exploring an antagonist, either go all the way, or don’t bother, but leaning more that direction would have helped this book.
I’ve seen others say the book has more than a whiff of the ‘Noble Savage’ veneration endemic in modern New Agey thought, and while I know what they’re talking about and I agree with the general sentiment, I don’t see the Kesh civilization as ‘savage’ just because it has technologically regressed. I think the instinct is on but the words aren’t quite right. Current civilization is unambiguously portrayed as destructive, violent, and short-sighted, but, again, this is a perception filtered through the Kesh, and they probably view ‘ancient’ civilizations as simplistically as we do.

The narrator, an anthropologist who travels to the future to study these people, calls herself Pandora, all obvious implications included. What trouble, precisely, she thinks she is unleashing on the world by studying this culture is up for debate, but I get the feeling the Pandora allusion is not a reference to sorrows and troubles, specifically, so much as the concept that there is no going back from opening the box, and what is unleashed will never return. An awareness of a better way, maybe, or some self-effacing nonsense like that? Is it the equivalent of gaining knowledge and never being able to live in blissful ignorance again? 

Note: As of June 2025 the book is back in print! This was written in 2014. [[Older versions of the book came with a cassette of Kesh music and poetry, and though I usually find that gimmicky crap distracting at best (usually because it is rare to encounter the writer who is also a gifted songwriter) and I’m not inclined to seek it out, I admit I’m curious what she came up with, or at least, endorsed as an official representation of her work. I found my copy at a used book store, and found a receipt from a Waldenbooks in Colorado from 1988 in the back (I got the book in Philadelphia and it now lives with me in California–its setting, aptly enough–so it certainly is a well-traveled), which isn’t particularly relevant but I found cool. I just can’t find it now. The book was briefly reprinted in 2001 but has been out of print since, but doing a quick search I found several pennies-cheap copies of used paperbacks online. Why books like this go out of print and Fifty Shades of Whatever is selling millions of copies, I will never know, but I’m not going to allow this to become an elitist rant because I don’t particularly feel like being an insufferable twat right now.*]]

All said, I found this book a guilty pleasure–not guilty because it is poor writing (the opposite is true), but because it is so self-indulgent. It is self-indulgent for the author to write and self-indulgent for me to take pleasure in it, and I dislike the tendency to sneer at things that are pure self-indulgent escapism on that merit alone. God knows I read enough of it. We need sweets now and again. It’s an old school eco-feminist look into the Utopia that can result when industrial, patriarchal civilization collapses. If you are familiar with LeGuin’s work and like the thrust of her ideology, this is a real treat, a look into her ideal future.