Worlding the Chthulucene in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home

This article argues that Always Coming Home enacts Chthulucene worlding as a material-semiotic practice through which multispecies relations become experiential and generate forms of knowledge beyond theoretical discourse. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s formulation of the Chthulucene, the analysis positions the novel’s form as a site where relational ontologies take shape through participation, situating storytelling within processes of co-becoming across human and more-than-human worlds. The article shows how the text redefines progress through ecological attunement and situated practices, while its treatment of temporality reorients modes of knowing through cyclical and place-based frameworks. It further demonstrates how narrative operates as a material-semiotic configuration that embeds ethical relations within lived experience. By foregrounding literature as a mode of world-making, this study establishes speculative fiction as a methodological site within the environmental humanities, capable of generating situated and embodied ecological knowledge for inhabiting damaged worlds.