Literary Significance and Criticism
It has been noted that Always Coming Home underscores Le Guin's long-standing anthropological interests. The Valley of Na is modeled on the landscape of California's Napa Valley, where Ursula Le Guin grew up as a child.
Like much of Le Guin's work, Always Coming Home follows Native American and Taoist themes. It is set in a time so post-apocalyptic that no cultural source can remember the apocalypse, though a few folk tales refer to our time. The only signs of our civilisation that have lasted into their time are artifacts such as styrofoam and a self-manufacturing, self-maintaining, solar-system-wide computer network.
Stone Telling's narrative may be seen as a return to the theme of The Dispossessed and The Eye of the Heron, in which a person from an anarchistic society visits an acquisitive government-ruled society and returns.
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