#the word for world is forest

[bookcoversonly]

Title: The Word for World Is Forest | Author: Ursula Le Guin | Publisher: Berkley Books (1976)

[probablyasocialecologist]

Despite the 48 intervening years, the novella still comes easily and disagreeably. Davidson in particularly is frighteningly familiar, a white supremacist assured of his moral certitude, convinced that he has both the right and duty to murder creechies after they rise up from forced servitude and destroy a logging camp, killing some 200 Terrans. Following an interdict from Earth—a member of the new League of Worlds—that the Terran colonists of New Tahiti leave the Athsheans alone pending the League’s audit of the colony’s impact on the indigenous humans (an intervention pushed by Terran anthropologist or “hilfer” Raj Lyubov and two visiting non-Terran humans, a Cetian and a Hain), Davidson refuses to give up his crusade against the creechies.  Like H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy before and James Cameron’s Avatar after, Word for World pits the Bad Guy against the indigenous population as a representative of the worst aspects of human (Terran) life: a god-hero complex driven by greed, racism, and self-assured superiority over all life. The Davidson figure (Kellog in Piper, Quaritch in Cameron’s film) is juxtaposed by Lyubov, an anthropologist who advocates strongly for Athshe’s independence, representing a vaguely liberal they’re-human-too response to Terran expansionism. Word for World departs from the eco-capitalist fantasies of similar texts, from the idea that colonial expansion and resource extraction are OK but within reason, by presenting things from the indigenous perspective and not treating the “within reason” perspective as the final word on colonialism.  In other words, Le Guin provides a strong case for the Athsheans’ swift and violent retaliation against the Terrans, including the killing of 500 women (newly brought to New Tahiti to “entertain” the two-thousand-plus workforce of Terran men) so the Terrans cannot “breed.” Readers of course are aware that the colony has a brand new ansible, has just learned of the League’s new interdict against conflict with the locals, and might very well lose their colonial charter. This is the “within reason” response: Earth learn that the colonists went “too far,” so an attempt must be made to reign them in; as Colonel Dongh, administrator of the colony tells Selver, temporary leader of the Athsheans upon the Terrans’ defeat, the release of “voluntary” laborers should have been enough to appease the Athsheans. This is the rhetoric of bullies and empires when their former victims are still angry: But we stopped murdering/bombing/enslaving you, so why’re you mad? 

[pulchrasilva]

Le guin is truly so good at making me uncomfortable with like. Reality and humanity. This is not escapism this is undeniably the real world. She makes you face that fact head on

[haveyoureadthisscifibook]

vote yes if you have finished the entire book.

vote no if you have not finished the entire book.

(faq · submit a book)

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Ursula K. Le Guin - The Word for World Is Forest - Berkley - 1976 (cover art by Richard M. Powers)

[whilereadingandwalking]

I read the majority of The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin under the shifting shade of the Portola redwoods. The Athsheans' world is under fierce attack by yumens, who want to mine their planet for lumber and enslave the natives who live there. But Selver dreams a world in which they can reclaim their planet, before it's too late.

This novella is pure perfection. Through showing viewpoints of the brutal, ugly Davidson, and his determination to wipe the planet clean, and of anthropologist Lyubov, who does his best but is himself a product of the colonialist mindset, Le Guin perfectly vivisects the corruption of imperialism, the way that violence spreads to be an intrinsic part of every piece of it. For ultimately, Selver and the Athsheans can only reclaim their planet by using the yumens' tools against them.

It is a superb novella, and I won't say more for fear of ruining it. It's one I'll return to thinking about again and again, and every time I think of it, I'll think of sitting beneath a 1,000+ year old tree, and of wondering what it has seen, and what it might see from us next.

Content warnings for colonization, racism, misogyny, violence, rape/sexual assault.

[have-you-read-this-short-fiction]

[literary-illuminati]

Book Review 27 – The Word for World is Forest by Ursula LeGuin

I’ve meant to read more LeGuin for a long time – I read Wizard of Earthsea in elementary school, the Dispossessed a few years back, and several volumes worth of Omelas discourse, but that’s about it – but I’ll be honest; I only grabbed this because I was desperately sprinting through shorter books to catch up to my reading goal and someone recommended it as being reasonably-sized. That said, I’m really incredibly glad I’m did.

The book tells the story of a stable, peaceful world being violently colonized by foreigners with a sharply limited understanding of its ecology and an (at best0 utterly condescending and dismissive attitude towards the native inhabitants. Eventually, all the atrocities give rise to a violent resistance movement among the colonized and, after a dramatic change in metropolitan politics destabilizes the colonial apparatus and several massacres, they force the (surviving) colonists to surrender and leave the world behind. The book ends on a mournful note, with the idea that the violence necessary to defeat the colonists has permanently tainted indigenous society, and the near-utopian idyll of their prior lives is now lost forever.

So! Can you guess that this book was written by an American in the early ‘70s?

But actually it was a fascinating read, if as much as a cultural artifact as as a narrative.

At it’s most basic – one of the two inciting incidents of the book is the Terran government the colonists answer to imposing a bunch of liberal reforms (ending slave labour and punitive expeditions and institutionalized rape, that sort of thing), and then ending up with the colonial establishment being split between a) those who seem honestly confused with why any of the natives have any issues with the continuing colonization, they’re being humane about it now! And b) the ones going full Rhodesian and treating being told to stop massacring people as the greatest tyranny inflicted in the history of mankind. All very authentically late-20th century.

The representation of Terran culture was an intriguing mix of futuristic and totally unchanged, as well. Earth was apparently entirely ecologically fucked and in dire need of organic materials (hence the desperate colonization drive), a prediction that hasn’t aged a day. Race exists, but the categories have gotten scrambled and rearranged, and is only at all salient in the mind of the local bloodthirsty ultracolonialist fanatic, whose sense of terran solidarity lasts exactly up until he needs people to blame (and, given the callouts to the Vietnam war that abound through the thing, not accidental that his intra-terran racism is all directed towards Asians).

Though there’s something to be said for how viscerally unpleasant the head of the villain is to be in. Closest comparison that comes to mind is the Victorian chapters of A Song of Ice and Fire? He’s a real piece of shit.

Something very modern about the conceit that men of all creeds and colours will unite around a grand shared enterprise of brutally oppressing and exploiting ET instead.

Men, specifically, because the Terran colony as we see it is basically drowning in machismo. The only women involved in the enterprise are either mail order brides or sex workers, and I don’t believe any one of them gets a name or more than a line of perfunctory dialogue anywhere in the book. Their whole purpose is, basically, to represent the possible entrenchment of colonialism by the establishment of a self-sustaining population, and then to be massacred to a woman by the Athsheans to avert just that possibility. (The book’s portrayal of warfare is pretty thoroughly unsentimental like that on all sides).

Also an interesting cultural artifact – the fact that the multiple intelligent humanoid species are explained as all actually being human, the result of some prehistoric precusor species spreading the species around different worlds who would then reunite with each other as they reach the stars. I have the strong impression that this was a pretty common trope back then, but it’s one you essentially never see in modern sci fi. Not a clue why, but interesting way tastes have changed.

The Athsheans themselves are interesting as an invented culture, with their mystical and constant dreaming and their odd gender roles, but they also are very nearly the platonic ideal of the whole ‘morally pure noble savage’ archetype. On the one hand, they – with the exception of a few very rare forms of mental illness – even have a concept of why someone might consciously choose to kill another human. They resolve most interpersonal disputes by singing at each other. They live carefully in tune with their natural surroundings, and have no need for plantations or mines or factories. And so on.

And on the other hand – they have no history. The way everyone does things and the way society is structured stretches back beyond the bounds of memory, and the entire world has basically one more-or-less-homogenus culture where every band has the same basic socio-political organization and the same theology. The one sympathetically-portrayed colonial anthropologist call them perfectly evolved for their environment and so stagnant, and one rather gets the sense that he’s supposed to be right about everything except the value judgment. And so the greatest tragedy of colonialism is shown to be the moral corruption of the Athsheans, brutalized out of their prelapsarian dream and forced to become murderous to regain their freedom. It is, honestly, a trope I don’t much care for.

(It’s an idle thought I don’t really know what to do with, but the Athshean concept of gods – dreamers who bring ideas and concepts from the dream and incarnate them in the material world – also kind of reminds me of the Innocences in Disco Elysium?)

Anyway, LeGuin still is a great writer, and this really was a fascinating read.

[ythealleycat]

2. Synchronicity Can Happen at Almost Any Time

A few years ago, a few years after the first publication in America of The Word For World Is Forest, I had the great pleasure of meeting Dr Charles Tart, a psychologist well known for his researches into and his book on Altered States of Consciousness. He asked me if I had modelled the Athsheans of the story upon the Senoi people of Malaysia. The who? said I, so he told me about them. The Senoi are, or were, a people whose culture includes and is indeed substantially based upon a deliberate training in and use of the dream. Dr Tart's book includes a brief article on them by Kilton Steward.

Breakfast in the Senoi house is like a dream clinic, with the father and older brothers listening to and analysing the dreams of the children...

When the Senoi child reports a falling dream, the adult answers with enthusiasm, 'That is a wonderful dream, one of the best dreams a man can have. Where did you fall to, and what did you discover?'

The Senoi dream is meaningful, active, and creative. Adults deliberately go into their dreams to solve problems of interpersonal and intercultural conflict. They come out of their dreams with a new song, tool, dance, idea. The waking and the dreaming states are equally valid, each acting upon the other in complementary fashion.

The article implies, by omission rather than by direct statement, that the men are the 'great dreamers' among the Senoi; whether this means that the women are socially inferior, or that their role (as among the Athsheans) is equal and compensatory, is not clear. Nor is there any mention of the Senoi conception of divinity, the numinous, etc.; it is merely stated that they do not practice magic, though they are perfectly willing to let neighbouring peoples think they do, as this discourages invasion.

They have built a system of inter-personal relations which, in the field of psychology, is perhaps on a level with our attainments in such areas as television and nuclear physics.

It appears that the Senoi have not had a war, or a murder, for several hundred years.

There they are, twelve thousand of them, farming, hunting, fishing, and dreaming, in the rain forests of the mountains of Malaysia. Or there they were, in 1935 - perhaps. Kilton Stewart's report on them has had no professional sequels that I know of. Were they ever there, and if so, are they still there? In the waking time, I mean, in what we so fantastically call 'the real world'. In the dream time, of course, they are there, and here.

I thought I was inventing my own lot of imaginary aliens, and I was only describing the Senoi. It is not only the Captain Davidsons who can be found in the unconscious, if one looks. The quiet people who do not kill each other are there, too. It seems that a great deal is there, the things that we most fear (and therefore deny), the things that we most need (and therefore deny). I wonder, couldn't we start listening to our dreams, and our children's dreams?

'Where did you fall to, and what did you discover?'

(Portland, 1976.)

Ursula K. Le Guin, from the foreword to The Word For World Is Forest, Gollancz SF Masterworks paperback edition 2022.

[thelastofthebookworms]

You'll find the other polls in my 'sf polls' tag / my pinned post. I also have a 'fantasy polls' tag and 'fairy tales' tag in my pinned post.

[dreamsbeyondsleep]

Between this guy and Genly "women are more alien to me than actual aliens" Ai, it's clear that Terrans will just send anybody into space.

[frankensteinmutual]

Hello! You seem like someone who reads a lot to me so I was wondering if you have any recommendation on books like 'Princess Mononoke' thank you so much! Your pinned post is amazing I hope someday be smart as you, you must read a lot and that's impressive

honestly don't know if this is supposed to be some kind of bait but I'm just going to respond to it as if it wasn't

unfortunately I don't really read all that much anymore, at least not outside of uni, and I can't really think of anything that truly feels like princess mononoke, but here are some books that came to mind as close enough:

descriptions under the cut!

the word for world is forest by ursula k. le guin

probably comes closest with its very strong environmental message, as well as themes of war and colonisation. it does have some magical and spiritual elements here and there, but still very much falls on the side of sci-fi rather than fantasy, and lacks the whimsical nature even the darkest of ghibli films at times possess. nevertheless my top recommendation!

lanny by max porter

if you're more interested in explorations of the mysterious character of nature, then you'll find that here. lanny also explores the relationship between humans and nature in a very interesting and unique way, and the way it's written makes it an almost dreamlike experience. it's a narrative of much smaller scale, but reading it is kind of what I imagine it must feel like to be part of a forest.

silver in the wood by emily tesh

speaking of being part of an enchanted forest, this little fairytale was basically made to be adapted into a ghibli movie. mythical forest creatures, fae law, gay love and a bit of a gothic twist – maybe mononoke isn't necessarily the best of miyazaki's works to compare it to, but it's not hard to imagine something like this story unfolding somewhere in those ancient woods.

ghost wall by sarah moss

this one might be a bit of a stretch, but I think it's worth a shot. a feminist narrative set in the woods and also very deeply thematically rooted in nature, with a subdued dark tone and occult atmosphere. the female protagonist's relationship to her wild and tamed environments is central, and throughout the novel there is a kind of quiet violence unsettlingly simmering just beneath the surface. I think san herself would love this book.

(honourable mention:

the buried giant by kazuo ishiguro

this is an honourable mention because I haven't actually finished reading it yet, but so far I think it might deserve a place on this list!)

[pulchrasilva]

I LOVE WHEN STORIES POSE COMPLEX ETHICAL QUESTIONS AND EXPLORE DIFFICULT PARTS OF OUR OWN SOCIETY THROUGH A SCIFI/FANTASY/ETC LENS, PUTTING THOSE THINGS INTO A TOTALLY SEPARATE CONTEXT TO MAKE IT EASIER TO ANALYSE AND NEVER GIVING YOU A CLEAR/DEFINED ANSWER BUT DISCUSSING IT, THE NUANCE IS IN THE STORY TELLING, THE SYMPATHISING WITH BOTH THE "GOOD" AND THE "BAD" CHARACTERS YEAAAH

[fullslack]

“The Word for World is Forest”, by Ursula K. Le Guin

Cover art by Richard Powers

(Berkley Medallion, 1976)

[gollancz]

The covers to our new Best of the Masterworks editions turned out so good you guys.

Credit to thelostlibrary on Instagram for the glamour shot.

[comicdissectionpod]

“Kill me now me quit your damned gloating.”

“Kill you?” Selver said, and he’s eyes looking up at Davidson seemed to shine, very clear and terrible, in the twilight of the forest. “I can’t kill you, Davidson. You’re a god. You must do it yourself.”

-The Word for World is Forest, Ursula K. Le Guin