Review: Always Coming Home

Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a 3-star, DNF review.

The setting for the book is the American west coast after intelligent computers have surpassed humanity. The AI are barely present as a potential source of information via computer terminals.

Humanity has devolved back into tribes that seem heavily influenced by North American First Nations peoples. Many of the circumstances in the story evoke those cultural and religious traditions.

The circumstances that cause most of the dominant American culture to disappear never become clear.

I picked up this book because some fellow genre fans recommended it. While I didn't think it was bad, it just didn't hold my attention - hence the DNF. There were characters that might have been interesting but just weren't.

The presence of serious consideration of First Nations religious beliefs was odd. There wasn't anything to suggest that those beliefs were anything more important than beliefs.

Also odd was the potential for consulting the AI computers for information and solutions to human problems was not more widely utilized. Instead, the entire culture had devolved back into near subsistance survival. The cultural avoidance of seeking improvement and progress was inhuman. Every human culture seeks some sort of improvement.

I put it down about 60% of the way through and just couldn't justify picking it back up.

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