To quote Princess Leia, sometimes you cannot go home again. Why this might be varies from story to story… Perhaps home is unrecognizable, or has vanished entirely. Perhaps you yourself have been changed and can no longer fit in as you did in the past. Whatever the reason behind this particular experience of alienation, it is fodder for engaging stories. You might enjoy these five examples.
Rocannon’s World by Ursula K. Le Guin (1966)
The highborn lady Semley sets out to reclaim a valuable family heirloom. It does not take her long to discover the necklace she seeks is in a Starlord’s trove. Unfortunately for Semley, the Clayfolk from whom she demands aid are willing to help her travel to the Starlords’ distant land. They don’t tell her that the Starlords—emissaries from the League of All Worlds—came from another star. They don’t tell her that when she returns she will have aged only a few months, while enough time will have passed on her homeworld for her husband to die and her daughter to have grown into a young woman.
***
The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang (2018)
Academic prowess allows Fang “Rin” Runin to escape one conventional fate (arranged marriage) for an equally conventional but far preferable one: studying at the prestigious academy in Sinegard. Success at the academy would lead to a comfortable life as a scholar or bureaucrat—unromantic, but part of the way things have been done in Nikan for a very long time. Alas, while the Federation of Mugen covets Nikan’s land, it has no use for the people currently living on the land. Rin’s academic ambitions have been sidelined by genocidal war. All she knows will be swept away, and Rin herself will be transformed beyond recognition.
***
Guardian of the Darkness (Moribito, Volume 2) by Nahoko Uehashi (1999)
Consigned to death by an ambitious courtier with his eye on a throne, Balsa fled Kanbal with her foster father, Jiguro. Decades have passed. The man who wanted Balsa dead is himself dead, as is Jiguro. Now it’s safe enough to return to her homeland to set old ghosts at rest…or so Balsa thinks. Courtier Yuguro would disagree. Balsa is a reminder of a dead past, a reminder who could threaten his control of the current king of Kanbal. Better for all if the disruptive element were quietly buried.
Note: only two of the eleven books in this series have been translated into English. That’s unfortunate, as I don’t read Japanese.
***
Binti by Nnedi Okorafor (2015)
Binti left Earth and her people, the Himba, to pursue education in a cosmopolitan, off-world university. The story’s setting features faster-than-light travel—no relativistic time problems for Binti. Instead, she returns to Earth transformed by her experiences out in the stars. The Himba enjoy ordered, predictable lives. Binti discovers that her people’s distaste for the unconventional now extends to Binti herself. Adjusting to Binti as she is—educated in alien ways, physically changed as well—requires effort that her family and neighbours prefer not to exert. Rejecting Binti for being the person she is, rather than the person her community wanted her to be, is so much easier…
***
Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang (2020)
The Mercury Group, a cohort of Martian teenagers, was dispatched from Mars to Earth as part of an effort to defrost diplomatic and trade relations between Earth and the breakaway Martian republic. Unrestricted contact with Terrestrials has worked changes on the teens. Luoying, for example, comes home wondering if her grandfather is the national hero she grew up believing him to be, or if he is the dictator Earth insists he is.
Even if personal transformations were not enough to make it difficult for the Mercury Group to reintegrate seamlessly with Martian society, Mars itself is on the brink of a fundamental political transformation. Just as Luoying is no longer the child she was when she left, so too will the Mars of her childhood be gone forever.
***
No doubt you have your own favourite examples you cannot believe I failed to mention in this essay—feel free to remind me of them in comments below!
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is currently a finalist for the 2020 Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
More books (and even films) can be added to this list, but it’s a great list!
I need to start reading Ursula K. LeGuin’s books.
Thank you for including the Moribito series!
Frodo Baggins. Sometimes you have to give things up so that other people can have them. Sometimes that includes your home.
Haldeman’s Forever War seems an obvious candidate.
Well, Leia was quoting Thomas Wolfe, but… great list!
Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman, springs immediately to mind.
Robert Sheckley’s “Mindswap” . You may _think_ you’ve come home …
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (original radio version): “Most of the things which stir the universe up in any way are caused by dispossessed people. There are two ways of accounting for this. One is to say that if everyone just sat around at home nothing would ever happen – this is very simple…”
(I am just sitting around at home because of a deadly global plague, which may undercut the argument. I have become a home office worker, so I’m not entirely idle, and I may go to the supermarket in a day or so, but unless I jazz up my Journal of the Plague Year, it won’t be a gripping read.)
The Wheel of Time would apply here. All of the main Emond’s Field characters are changed forever. Only Perrin ever goes back to the Two Rivers (not counting dreams, visions, etc.), and even he can’t just resume his former life as it was before the adventure began.
OK – I volunteer toi be thge first to come up with the boring and predictable but still nevertheless very true example – LOTR. Frodo is too damaged, too changed and his eyes are way too open to all that is good and bad in Middle Earth to ever truly come home to the Shire. Toklien knew all about people who were too changed to ever truly come home – he was part of the lost generation of WWI.
You know just once I’d like to read a story about a boy escaping an arranged marriage, because quite often they had no more say than the girl.
@@@@@ 10
Loial sort of counts, I think. I’m sure there are more stories out there as well.
I just finished Ursula Vernon’s Black Dogs:The Mountain of Iron. Which demonstrates that sometime you can go home again, if only set the place on fire.
Though Ursula Le Guin also shows us, in “A Fisherman of the Inland Sea”, that sometimes, if you’re really lucky, you can go home again.
Also I’d like to nominate “’39”, by Queen, which tells us the tragedy of relativity in three minutes and thirty seconds. Lyrics by lead guitarist Brian May, who is now an astrophysics Ph.D.
@10,
One of the Brother Cadfael books has that as a plot- I believe it’s The Hermit of Eyton Forest.
Well, there was this guy Steve “all the members of my barbershop quartet are dead” Rogers…until he went home again.
@16: I understood that reference.
@10: There’s a “Merlin” episode just got repeated – the BBC show where Prince Arthur is a medieval teenager – where a marriage is arranged for him and it isn’t to Gwen. But I didn’t watch it all and he looked like regretfully obeying his father in the bit I did see.
@15, you are quite right!
. The boy is ten, and still at the ‘girls have cooties’ stage. And his intended is about ten years older and doesn’t want to marry a child. Which of course offends him. They join forces to get out of the mess and before escaping the boy tells his new ally that he could do worse than marry her.
@11, Loial sort of counts. He worries about marriage because the conventions of his people would give his wife authority over him, but he’s rather enthusiastic about the girl herself. And fortunately she admires his adventurous spirit and is totally onboard his ambition to write a book about the End Times they’re living through.
Okay, I stand corrected!
Foz Meadows’ “Accident of Stars/Tyranny of Queens”. Accidently swept along to another worl , and even more accidentally caught up in a civil conflict, our Heroine eventually returns from her sojourn in another world. However the scars, both physical and mental she’s received means she no longer fits in at high school…
April Daniel’s, “Dreadnought: Nemesis” 15 year-old Danny has a literally transformative experience when she witnessed the death of the previous Dreadnought, inheriting both incredible powers and the female body she’s always dreamed of. Unfortunately her transphobic father refuses to accept this…
Andre Norton “Dread Companion” On a frontier planet in the far futute Kilda find herself swept into a nightmarish faerie realm, along with the children in her care. Fortunately with help from a fellow human captive she escapes. Unfortunately, while she was gone more time passed than she thought…
And then there are the books where the protagonist says to him or herself, To hell with going home. I like it here!
There’s Andre Norton’s Knave of Dreams, where 20th century student Ramsay gets drawn into an alternative world of magic and murderous intrigue, and stays for the beautiful, not to mention intelligent and powerful, princess.
A displaced Pennsylvania State Trooper makes a similar choice in Lord Kalvin From Neverwhere.
Edmund Hamilton’s John Gordon has to go home so the prince from the Star Empire using his body, with his permission, can get back to his wife and brother. But gets a chance to go back to his true love and princess only to be swept into another crisis than nearly breaks up their relationship.
Two of the five children in Pamela Dean’s Secret Country Trilogy decide to go back to earth while the other three choose to stay in their fantasy kingdom, and one set of parents go with them.
And of course Dorothy eventually takes Uncle Henry and Aunty Em to live with her for good in Oz, because seriously how could anybody prefer Kansas?