Fall sf work/shop

IN URSULA LE GUIN’s Always Coming Home, which takes place in what might be far future California, the people of the Valley tell stories about the “backward-heads.” These are people who literally have their heads on backward, and are said to lurk in the poisoned lands where human people can no longer live. Stories of backward-heads are among the most frightening and ghoulish ghost stories told in the Valley: a child would run screaming if they imagined seeing one, and an actor merely turning to look over their shoulder in a play would send a shiver through the crowd. The unnamed editor of the book calls the backward-heads “the literalization of a metaphor” and connects them to the people who lived generations before—people who had caused vast desolation to the land and sea, whose waste continued to litter the world, causing sickness and death. The people of the Valley did not conceive that such acts as they saw and felt much evidence of in their world…had not been deliberate. In their…