In the essay below, Wytenbroek details the marked differences between the two societies portrayed in Always Coming Home and notes how the work "adds a completely new dimension to Le Guin's study and presentation of war, as found in the rest of her science fiction."

Ursula K. Le Guin is a pacifist, a fact she has made clear on numerous occasions, both in her writings and her political activities Throughout her writings, she has dealt with war, or armed conflict, in various ways, examining it from a different angle in each work m which such conflict appeared. She examined the psychology of war to a large extent in The Word for World is Forest (1972), especially through the character of Captain Davidson. She looked at what happened to pacifists who could or would not fight back in The Dispossessed (1974), while she considered what happened to pacifists who did...