According to Janice Antczak, in Science Fiction: The Mythos of a New Romance, science fiction ‘gives clear expression to the interconnectedness of myth and literature’ in that ‘the conventions of the science fiction story express the mythic archetypes of the quest in the idiom of the space age’. Antczak is arguing that, as a genre, science fiction is displaying ‘the elements of the monomyth of the hero and the quest’.But in equating the entire genre with the monomyth, it does seem Antczak paints with a rather broad brush. As seen in Chapter Two, there are other myths at work in science fiction, and in fantasy, as Le Guin illustrates in The Dispossessed and in Earthsea. In addition to the monomyth, of which Earthsea, The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home are all expressions, there is a much older myth being expressed in the latter two novels: the myth of utopia.

Before examining The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home as contemporary expressions of the utopian myth, it is necessary to look first at utopia both as myth and as literary genre. With both aspects of utopia defined, I will examine the connections between myth and genre (in this instance, science fiction, which many have said evolved from utopian literature). Because the author is creating an alternative society as a critique of his or her own, a literary utopia is inherently rhetorical. Given this, I will examine Le Guin's utopias, with particular emphasis given to Always Coming Home as it is the most recent and the closest to what she believes a utopia should be. It is my contention that Le Guin's choice of sources for her alternative societies becomes part of her argument. Furthermore, as she did with the monomyth, Le Guin is again working inside and against the established generic conventions of utopian literature. This subversion and inversion again will become part of her argument as the myth itself becomes rhetorical.

The Myth of Utopia

The root myth of utopia is the myth of the Golden Age, when humans supposedly inhabited a perfect world as a gift from the gods. Utopian narratives are human constructs attempting to recapture this mythic perfect world, the ideal human past – each one rhetorical, an argument to convince the reader that this is the way to recover lost Eden, and more importantly, this is what is wrong with the way things are now.