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.
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.
it's a fairly short and straightforward story about resistance to colonization, but embedded in it is a kind of complicated discussion about the legitimacy of violence. It seems like it was in part a commentary on the Vietnam War (which is even alluded to at one point).
Don Davidson is one of the more thoroughly unpleasant viewpoint characters I've read; fortunately he is meant to be villainous, & at any rate it's only from his point of view for about a third of the book. His motivation, worldview & actions are disturbing but accurate for a certain sort of man.
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.
Review of 'The Word for World is Forest' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
This was a weird tone from Ursula. Davidson in particular was jarring. As I approached the halfway point I thought, I’m getting Vietnam vibes… I looked it up and that does seem to be the intention. I don’t know that that worked for me 100% because it was more guilty of projecting ourselves in the present into the far future. I think that always happens to some degree, but Davidson is pretty egregious.
Having said that, the point is still valid. I don’t know that we’ll ever really outgrow imperialist/colonialist/exploitative tendencies. Depends on how optimistic or pessimistic you are about the future, I guess.
I felt like Davidson was a caricature, but as the story went on he became an interesting case study in self-deception and warped reality. Given the past few years in the US, I couldn’t brush it aside as unbelievable.
Favorite quote: But even the most unmissionary …
This was a weird tone from Ursula. Davidson in particular was jarring. As I approached the halfway point I thought, I’m getting Vietnam vibes… I looked it up and that does seem to be the intention. I don’t know that that worked for me 100% because it was more guilty of projecting ourselves in the present into the far future. I think that always happens to some degree, but Davidson is pretty egregious.
Having said that, the point is still valid. I don’t know that we’ll ever really outgrow imperialist/colonialist/exploitative tendencies. Depends on how optimistic or pessimistic you are about the future, I guess.
I felt like Davidson was a caricature, but as the story went on he became an interesting case study in self-deception and warped reality. Given the past few years in the US, I couldn’t brush it aside as unbelievable.
Favorite quote: But even the most unmissionary soul, unless he pretends he has no emotions, is sometimes faced with a choice between commission and omission. 'What are they doing?' abruptly becomes, 'What are we doing?' and then, 'What must I do?’
Review of 'Word for World is Forest' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Le Guin’s work ages well. Infuriating; heartbreaking; you know the whole book is a train wreck, you know you won’t escape unharmed, you go in anyway because you trust Le Guin to leave you, not safe, but somehow a better person. What a heart she had.
Review of 'The Word For World Is Forest' on 'Storygraph'
5 stars
A short but an interesting allegory on racism and colonialism, although I found the characters somewhat stereotyped.
The colonialists are humans on a remote planet where the indigenous people are used as slaves, even though regulations forbid it, while their forest-covered world is denuded and turned into a monoculture.