Delany is an award-winning science-fiction writer and editor. In the following review, he praises Always Coming Home as Le Guin's "most satisfying text among a set of texts that have provided much imaginative pleasure in her 23 years as an author."

With high invention and deep intelligence, Always Coming Home presents, in alternating narratives, poems and expositions, Ursula K. Le Gum's most consistently lyric and luminous book in a career adorned with some of the most precise and passionate prose in the service of a major imaginative vision.

Mrs. Le Guin has created an entire ethnography of the far future in her book It's called a novel. But even to glance at it is to suspect it's more than, or other than, that the oversize trade paperback is boxed with a tape cassette of delicate songs, poems and haunting dance pieces, purportedly recorded on site. Liner notes are...