Ursula K. Le Guin: The Word for World Is Forest (Paperback, 1976, Berkley)
mass market paperback, 169 pages
Published Nov. 30, 1976 by Berkley.
Centuries in the future, Terrans have established a logging colony & military base named “New Tahiti” on a tree-covered planet whose small, green-furred, big-eyed inhabitants have a culture centered on lucid dreaming. Terran greed spirals around native innocence & wisdom, overturning the ancient society.
Humans have learned interstellar travel from the Hainish (the origin-planet of all humanoid races, including Athsheans). Various planets have been expanding independently, but during the novel it’s learned that the League of All Worlds has been formed. News arrives via an ansible, a new discovery. Previously they had been cut off, 27 light years from home.
The story occurs after The Dispossessed, where both the ansible & the League of Worlds are unrealised. Also well before Planet of Exile, where human settlers have learned to coexist. The 24th century has been suggested.
Terran colonists take over the planet locals call Athshe, meaning “forest,” rather than “dirt,” …
Centuries in the future, Terrans have established a logging colony & military base named “New Tahiti” on a tree-covered planet whose small, green-furred, big-eyed inhabitants have a culture centered on lucid dreaming. Terran greed spirals around native innocence & wisdom, overturning the ancient society.
Humans have learned interstellar travel from the Hainish (the origin-planet of all humanoid races, including Athsheans). Various planets have been expanding independently, but during the novel it’s learned that the League of All Worlds has been formed. News arrives via an ansible, a new discovery. Previously they had been cut off, 27 light years from home.
The story occurs after The Dispossessed, where both the ansible & the League of Worlds are unrealised. Also well before Planet of Exile, where human settlers have learned to coexist. The 24th century has been suggested.
Terran colonists take over the planet locals call Athshe, meaning “forest,” rather than “dirt,” like their home planet Terra. They follow the 19th century model of colonization: felling trees, planting farms, digging mines & enslaving indigenous peoples. The natives are unequipped to comprehend this. They’re a subsistence race who rely on the forests & have no cultural precedent for tyranny, slavery or war. The invaders take their land without resistance until one fatal act sets rebellion in motion & changes the people of both worlds forever.
Another great read. It's relatively short but doesn't feel like anything is lost. The glimpses of League power and the Athshe societies felt really awe inspiring.
The whole "Hainish" universe is so cool! I love the different perspectives.
A novella about colonialism and fighting it, but also about ecology, indigenous knowledges, dreaming and waking, perception and reality, and hope in the face of seemingly overwhelming power.
LeGuin is scarily good at making colonialism tangible from both the perspective of the colonised and the coloniser, and she's doing so in her usual unpretentious and precise way.
After reading lots of white male apolitical hard sci-fi, this was a breath of fresh air – or, as the Athsheans would put it, sanity.
Highly recommended.
Genuinely amazed by how much Le Guin fits into what's pretty much just a novella. Colonialism, racism, environmental destruction, and toxic masculinity, sure, but also musings on the mental machinations therein. Particularly appreciated the way she plays with language -- the chapters from the point of view of the humans, particularly the truly awful Davidson, are brutal, while the chapters from the point of view of the Athsheans start off lyrical, almost dreamlike, but change over the course of the book as their ways of thinking are polluted by the Terrans. Highly recommended.
I don't generally enjoy science fiction, and although I do love Ursula le Guin's theory and ideas I have never managed to finish any of her books before this one. Her writing is good, but I find that science fiction often gets too tied up in hammering home its analogies without remembering to tell a good story. The Word for World is Forest does not have this problem.
Ostensibly, this is a novel about two races of human. The first are Terrans (from Earth) who have landed on a distant planet and are cutting down its rich forested surface because there is no wood left on Earth. The other are Athsheans, who are colonised, enslaved in all but name, and are being forced to live their lives in a "terran" way by sleeping at night and working in the daytime, for example. The book weaves in the injustices of settler …
I don't generally enjoy science fiction, and although I do love Ursula le Guin's theory and ideas I have never managed to finish any of her books before this one. Her writing is good, but I find that science fiction often gets too tied up in hammering home its analogies without remembering to tell a good story. The Word for World is Forest does not have this problem.
Ostensibly, this is a novel about two races of human. The first are Terrans (from Earth) who have landed on a distant planet and are cutting down its rich forested surface because there is no wood left on Earth. The other are Athsheans, who are colonised, enslaved in all but name, and are being forced to live their lives in a "terran" way by sleeping at night and working in the daytime, for example. The book weaves in the injustices of settler colonialism and the violence of technological war, telling a story that many of us are familiar with.
Although at times the book goes to great lengths to hammer its messages home, it remains interesting enough throughout. The real strength is in the way it presents "otherness". The Athsheans call their world "forest", and so all life comes from trees, just as terrans call their world "earth" as they are promethean, born from clay. Terrans cannot "dream" like the Athsheans without using hallucinogenics, and violence, once introduced as an idea to their society, cannot be unlearned.
Some of the analogies are unresolved. For example, all of the main characters are male, and no female character is given any prominent voice. Le Guin was not a writer who did things accidentally, but it's not clear whether she was critiquing how women are portrayed in similar novels, or how violence is a male obsession, or something else. Irrespective, this is still worthwhile, contemplative and an enjoyable book.
Das buch behandelt kolonialismus, hat also viele sehr gewalttätige und rassisitische szenen. Die geschichte ist eigentlich ganz einfach: 2 gruppen menschen, die in sehr verschiedenen umgebungen aufgewachsen sind, treffen aufeinander und hauen sich die köppe ein. Trotzdem war es spannend zu lesen, denn die Athsheaner haben eine interessante art, an die dinge heranzugehen.
This is a short book with a simple premise and story. It's told very well through 3 separate viewpoints. The characters, though clearly defined, appear somewhat two-dimensional. Perhaps, though, this is just a limitation of the short nature of the story, at just barely 200 pages. Still, I enjoyed it for its simplicity. The similarity to so many other stories (humans conquering natives, which rise up against them) made it feel a tad derivative, though bear in mind that this was written in the 1970s so perhaps it was seen as fresh and new among the science fiction community back then?
For a full review, see my blog: strakul.blogspot.com/2013/09/book-review-word-for-world-is-forest-by.html
Purchasable
https://bookshop.org/books/the-word-for-world-is-forest/9780765324641.