CALIFORNIANS IN LE GUIN’S NEW WORLD

Like artisans who mark their boutiques with insignias of their craft, Ursula Le Guin has nailed up a gargoyle high in her entrance hall. A replica of a demon from the Cathedral of Notre Dame, the fiend was purchased in Paris where the writer and her husband married, and for 26 years it has leered down on the household where fantasy is created.

Yet Le Guin is not a sorceress of the phantasmagoric, nor a mind-boggler in the vein of a Jules Verne. The 56-year-old novelist has blithely bounced from planet to planet and, in her Hainish cycle, brought into being a storybook universe. But in a field largely dominated by mimics and gimmicks, Le Guin has honed a reputation as a thoughtful science-fiction writer.

She won the National Book Award with “The Farthest Shore” in 1972, and several times has garnered science fiction’s two top honors, the Nebula and the Hugo awards. Her short fantasies also have appeared in “The New Yorker.”

Le Guin’s lastest book, “Always Coming Home,” published this month by Harper & Row, has been anticipated as her magnum opus. After spinning out a book a year, Le Guin has spent four years piecing together this 15th effort, which she describes as “an archeology of the future.”

In it she has created the ethnology of a future Californian people--their language, customs, recipes. The book comes packaged with a cassette of the music, poetry and songs of the tribe and includes drawings of artifacts and plants by an archeological artist.

“This time I really cut loose,” says Le Guin, sitting on one of the verandas that rim her wood-frame house. Instead of slipping in an invented people, Le Guin has made their culture the background bulk for a slender narration and “one of the major functions of the book.”

“It wasn’t a process of invention,” she insists, “ but a process of discovery. You find a broken piece of pottery and you know it fits the pot.”

For Le Guin aficionados, this more complete creation of a society will not likely be surprising. Le Guin is the daughter of noted anthropologist, Alfred L. Kroeger, a primary force in the study and recording of American Indian life. In Berkeley, where Le Guin was raised, and at the family’s Napa Valley summer ranch, the author grew up with virtual “Indian uncles” and accumulated an oral tradition through tales told around evening fires. She learned traditions and lore, and remembers watching in awe as one “Indian uncle” doused himself in a patch of poison oak, appearing to prove beyond all childish doubt that native Americans are immune to the pale face’s poisonous itch.

In the early part of the century a northern Californian Indian surrendered himself to civilization after a lifetime at bay from Indian wars he thought still raging, and in 1961, Le Guin’s mother, Theodora, published his life in the best-selling book, “Ishi in Two Worlds.”

The Kesh, Le Guin’s fictional people, are largely modeled after native Americans. They are agrarian, egalitarian and pacifist, inhabiting the Napa Valley some time in the future, following a nuclear holocaust.

Although the Kesh are not a utopian society, they do represent an ideal of sorts. “The place I love best is the Napa Valley where I’ve gone just about every year of my life. I wanted to celebrate this piece of earth,” says Le Guin.

Following a myriad of galactic environments, the book also represents a personal homecoming for Le Guin. “These are my people. And this place I’m writing about is my home,” she says, speaking both literally and metaphorically. “It has been my home all my life. Home is a strange concept. A lot of Americans don’t have homes or don’t think about them very much. But everybody understands the meaning and has a kind of nostalgia for it.”

The home where Le Guin lives with her family could be a slice of idealized Americana. A rambling, roomy house, set in the hills above the Willamette River, it is complete with a flower garden and picket fence. Juggling feminism and domesticity, Le Guin has raised three children here and, often working “in odd moments and corners,” has built a body of works that includes tales for adolescents and one children’s book.

A short, sturdy woman with a boyish bob, she is a daughter of academe. She was graduated from Radcliffe College, took a master’s degree in French and Italian literature from Columbia University and traveled to Paris as a Fulbright scholar. Her three brothers and her husband, Charles Le Guin, are all university professors. It is little wonder that the author takes poorly to what she calls “the technological fix” of the sci-fi market.

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas come in for particular excoriation. “They have taken the genre back 30 years,” Le Guin says. “There’s no imagination in these big Spielberg epics. I resent the way he pulls everything onto an incredibly childish and predictable level and reduces it to something between violence and cuteness.” Le Guin sticks her tongue out in distaste and adds, “I’m probably the only person in the U.S. who didn’t see E.T.”

Nevertheless, fueled by “Star Wars” and derivative successes, the science-fiction field is enjoying a heyday, though without Le Guin’s approbation. “I don’t like to be categorized as a science-fiction writer. It’s a ghetto,” she says, complaining that science fiction is reviewed separately and en masse. “This is ignorance and bigotry.” To the intelligentsia, she says, “it’s relegated to something that odd young people read.”

Le Guin’s generation of science-fiction writers, including Gene Wolfe and Philip K. Dick, largely came of age in the 1960s. “We were expressing serious concerns through the metaphors of science fiction and fantasy, as Tolkien did,” Le Guin says. And the times were amicable to their vision. “In the days of flowerdom we were going to make the future better. Instead of a cold, sterile futuristic place full of ‘Star Wars,’ there was a feeling for a while of making the world more livable, more human. My kind of science-fiction writer fit right into this.”

Other than J. R. R. Tolkien, Le Guin’s own literary sources are outside the genre; from Charles Dickens they range through the Bronte sisters and Virginia Woolf to Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges.

Like them, she packs her fiction with strong ideas. In a Le Guinian universe, Western industrial society is the arch villain and civilization is a negative concept, encompassing the ills of weaponry, overpopulation and the practice of male and class supremacy. A formerly pipe-smoking feminist and an active pacifist, Le Guin is capable of erupting on the subject as surely as Mt. St. Helens, which just up on the horizon behind the house.

“There is no ideal Western society. We’ve gone too far. Our children will have a less good world. It’s going to change, who knows in what way. I hope it doesn’t crash.”

Le Guin offers the peaceful world of the Kesh as an antidote to the anguish of a bellicose, high-tech existence. “I think a lot of us are scared and tired. It gave me great pleasure to think of a world run on different human terms.”

At times Le Guin had lighthearted fun with her opus. The cassette of recorded songs and poems came about because, she says, “I wanted to hear what they sounded like.” Language sprang up when composer Todd Barton asked what tongue the Kesh spoke, surely not English. “Someone even suggested that we put in pine needle smells,” Le Guin says and chortles. She did throw in some family recipes, like cold lamb soup, which she found appropriate to the Kesh palate, and slyly slipped in she as the Kesh word for person, “to be a person, to exist.”

“I love concrete facts, whether they’re real or invented,” she says. “Part of the grip of fantasy is the day-to-day realism of the story.”

Le Guin’s plots are structured as spirals, with the protagonists taking a journey which, in the end, leads them home; “Always Coming Home,” is part of the pattern. Says Le Guin, “The more I try to do something different, the more of myself it becomes.”

Yet with metaphors of being literally alien, Le Guin gains a distance from immediate reality and can comfortably comment upon it. “I could never read murder mysteries,” she says. At Radcliffe, she realized she didn’t have to write about the people of Cambridge and invented a Central European country. “It freed me,” she says. “There’s no way I could have been an Ann Beattie”

Yet life chez Le Guin seems reassuringly mundane. The plumber is repairing the kitchen sink, a daughter and her family have dropped in from a camping trip in the Northwest, cats pad across the porch and Charles Le Guin has just gotten home from faculty meetings at Portland State University.

Still, there is the gargoyle and, leaving this seemingly ordinary house, one bids adieu to the devilish fiend. “Oh,” says a grinning Le Guin, “you should have seen the other one we had. It was chewing on a baby.”