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160 pages, ebook
First published March 17, 1972
"Maybe after I die people will be as they were before I was born, and before you came. But I do not think they will."In every book by Le Guin there is that special something for me, something that grabs a firm hold of my mind and heart and stubbornly hangs on, refusing to let go, burrowing deeply, growing roots, sprouting shoots that will go on to quietly, unobtrusively, almost imperceptibly change my mental landscape forever - by making me really think, by challenging established ideas, preconceptions and expectations with unexpected quiet subversive subtlety.
"But even the most unmissionary soul, unless he pretend 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?”
"You know the people you’re studying are going to get plowed under, and probably wiped out. It’s the way things are. It’s human nature, and you must know you can’t change that."
"But you must not pretend to have reasons to kill one another. Murder has no reason."And so we think we know how this story will go, right from the opening pages of this short book, the pages that seem to forgo the subtlety and go straight for the divide between Good and Evil. The Evil being the technologically superior ruthless Earthlings carelessly and brutally exploiting the resources and the inhabitants of a lushly green planet known as the Forest to its people. The Good being 'the natives', the seemingly harmless, attuned to their environment and themselves helpless race of humanoid Ewoks, immersed in the culture based on nature and dreaming. The inevitable clash between the 'native' Selver and the 'outsider' batshit-insane macho Davidson should represent this struggle, and we know that the underdog should win, and humans should be taught a lesson in the nature of true humanity, and that the life on the planet should continue in the lovely ways that recover from human influence and proceed to prosper in the satisfying feel-good way.
"[...] and above all Athshe, which meant the Forest, and the World. So Earth, Terra, meant both the soil and the planet, two meanings and one. But to the Athsheans soil, ground, earth was not that to which the dead return and by which the living live: the substance of their world was not earth, but forest. Terran man was clay, red dust. Athshean man was branch and root."
"But had he learned to kill his fellowmen among his own dreams of outrage and bereavement, or from the undreamed-of-actions of the strangers? Was he speaking his own language, or was he speaking Captain Davidson’s?"Le Guin's book was written in the heyday of the Vietnam war, and it's easy to see the parallels to it reading about Americans in battle machines fighting people in the forest. But it's just as easy to see parallels to the more mundane events that are present in our everyday lives. The questions periodically raised in the media about what's more important: preserving the livelihood of the farmers or saving a rare species of beetles? Ensuring livable wages to people in sweatshops overseas or cheap running shoes to the consumers in the Western world? Preserving delicate marine life systems or cheap oil drilling to ensure current wellbeing of people needing the fuel?
"Maybe after I die people will be as they were before I was born, and before you came. But I do not think they will."
Where did you fall to, and what did you discover?The story of The Word for World is Forest focuses on a military logging colony set up on the fictional planet of Athshe by Terrans (= people from planet Earth). The colonists have enslaved the completely non-aggressive native Athsheans, and treat them very harshly. Eventually, one of the natives, Selver, whose wife was raped and killed by the Terran military captain Davidson, leads a revolt against the Terrans, and succeeds in getting them to leave the planet. However, in the process the peaceful culture of the Athsheans is introduced to mass violence, and therefore changed.
We have all been afraid for four years, even we who live far from the yumens’ cities, and have only glimpsed them from hiding, or seen their ships fly over, or looked at the dead places where they cut down the world, or heard mere tales of these things. We are all afraid. Children wake from sleep crying of giants; women will not go far on their trading-journeys; men in the Lodges cannot sing. The fruit of fear is ripening. And I see you gather it. You are the harvester. All that we fear to know, you have seen, you have known: exile, shame, pain, the roof and walls of the world fallen, the mother dead in misery, the children untaught, uncherished…This is a new time for the world: a bad time. And you have suffered it all.The Athsheans, in contrast to the Terran colonizers, are shown as an innately peaceful and non-aggressive people, at least at the beginning of novel. Rape and murder are virtually unknown on their planet. Selver spends much of the novel reflecting on the effect that violence has on his own culture. He turns to violence, against the Athshean ethic, in order to save his culture as he sees it. However, unlike Davidson, who enjoys killing, Selver sees it as something poisoning his culture. Le Guin leaves it open if the Athshean culture is damaged beyond repair, or if they will be able to heal it and themselves in the future.