The Word for World Is Forest facts for kids

Le Guin giving a reading in 2008

The Word for World Is Forest is a science fiction novella by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin, first published in the United States in 1972 as a part of the anthology Again, Dangerous Visions, and published as a separate book in 1976 by Berkley Books. It is part of Le Guin's Hainish Cycle.

The story focuses on a military logging colony set up on the fictional planet of Athshe by people from Earth (referred to as "Terra"). The colonists have enslaved the completely non-aggressive native Athsheans, and treat them very harshly. Eventually, one of the natives, whose wife was killed by a Terran military captain, leads a revolt against the Terrans, and succeeds in getting them to leave the planet. However, in the process their own peaceful culture is introduced to mass violence for the first time.

The novel carries strongly anti-colonial and anti-militaristic overtones, driven partly by Le Guin's negative reaction to the Vietnam War. It also explores themes of sensitivity to the environment, and of connections between language and culture. It shares the theme of dreaming with Le Guin's novel The Lathe of Heaven, and the metaphor of the forest as a consciousness with the story "Vaster than Empires and More Slow".

The novella won the Hugo Award in 1973, and was nominated for several other awards. It received generally positive reviews from reviewers and scholars, and was variously described as moving and hard-hitting. Several critics, however, stated that it compared unfavorably with Le Guin's other works such as The Left Hand of Darkness, due to its sometimes polemic tone and lack of complex characters.

The novel was originally named "Little Green Men," in reference to the common science-fiction trope. In her introduction to the 1976 edition, Le Guin stated that she was concerned at the exploitation of the natural world by humans, particularly in the name of financial gain, and that this concern drove her story.

Setting

The Word for World is Forest is set in the fictional Hainish universe, which Le Guin introduced in her first novel Rocannon's World, published in 1966. In this alternative history, human beings did not evolve on Earth, but on Hain. The people of Hain colonized many neighboring planetary systems, including Terra (Earth) and Athshe, possibly a million years before the setting of the novels. The planets subsequently lost contact with each other, for reasons that Le Guin does not explain. Le Guin does not narrate the entire history of the Hainish universe at once, instead letting readers piece it together from various works.

The novels and other fictional works set in the Hainish universe recount the efforts to re-establish a galactic civilization. Explorers from Hain as well as other planets use interstellar ships taking years to travel between planetary systems, although the journey is shortened for the travelers due to relativistic time dilation, as well as through instantaneous interstellar communication using the ansible, introduced in The Dispossessed. At least two "thought experiments" are used in each novel; the background idea of a common origin for all the humanoid species, and a second idea unique to each novel. In The Word for World is Forest, the second thought experiment is the colonization of a pacifist culture on the planet Athshe by a military-controlled logging team from Earth, known in the novel as "Terra"; additionally, the inhabitants of Athshe recognize the people from Terra as human, but the Terrans do not see the Athsheans, who are small and covered in green fur, as human. The Athsheans refer to the Terrans as "yumens", while the Terrans tend to use the derogatory term "creechie".

Most of the surface of the planet of Athshe, known to the human colonizers as "New Tahiti", is taken up by ocean; the land surfaces are concentrated in a single half of the northern hemisphere, and prior to the arrival of Terran colonists, is entirely covered in forest. The Terrans are interested in using this forest as a source of timber, because wood has become a highly scarce commodity on Earth. Athshe's plants and animals are similar to those of Earth, placed there by the Hainish people in their first wave of colonisation that also settled Earth. The Cetian visitor also states categorically that the native humans "came from the same, original, Hainish stock".

The Athsheans are physically small, only about a meter tall, and covered in fine greenish fur. They are a very non-aggressive people. They have adopted a number of behaviors to avoid violence, including aggression-halting postures and competitive singing. Unlike Terrans the Athsheans follow a polycyclic sleep pattern, and their circadian rhythms make them most active at dawn and dusk; thus, they struggle to adapt to the 8-hour Terran working day. Athsheans are able to enter the dream state consciously, and their dreams both heal them and guide their behavior. Those individuals adept at interpreting dreams are seen as gods amongst the Athsheans.

In the internal chronology of the Hainish universe, the events of The Word for World is Forest occur after The Dispossessed, in which both the ansible and the League of Worlds are unrealised dreams. However, the novel is located prior to Rocannon's World, in which Terran mindspeech is seen as a distinct possibility. A date of 2368 CE has been suggested by reviewers, although Le Guin provides no direct statement of the date.

Style and structure

The novel has eight chapters, narrated by each of the three main characters in turn. Davidson narrates chapters 1, 4, and 7; Selver narrates chapters 2, 6, and 8; and Lyubov narrates chapters 3 and 5. This alternation emphasizes both the differences between the characters and their isolation within their societies. Lyubov and Davidson's chapters are narrated from a limited omniscient point of view, making their chapters seem like internal monologues. Davidson's belief in the inferiority of the Athsheans and his adversarial attitude towards the planet are directly presented to the reader, along with Lyubov's struggle to do his job dispassionately while following his personal morality. In contrast, Selver's chapters are written from a truly omniscient point of view, allowing Le Guin to give the reader information about the planet and its people. Selver has no extensive monologues; instead, several other Athsheans also feature prominently in his chapters.

Although the novel is an anti-war novel portraying a military conflict, unusually, it does not describe most of the action, planning, and strategy. Instead, most of the action happens off the page, and the novel focuses on the decisions being made about the conflict in the minds of the principal characters. The language used within each chapter shifts with the protagonist, revealing the way they think about the events of the book. Davidson's monologues are filled with the derogatory language he uses; the Athsheans are referred to by the slang term "creechie", the women in the colony are "prime human stock," and so forth.

Le Guin herself later said she was unhappy with the "strident" tone of the novel. She had been troubled by the Vietnam War, but was living in London when she wrote the novel, cut off from the anti-war movement she had been a part of in Oregon. Written in these circumstances, The Word for World is Forest became what Le Guin called a "preachment". She stated that writing the book was like "taking dictation from a boss with ulcers". She said that she had wanted to write about forests and dreaming, but that the "boss" had made her write instead about ecological destruction. Charlotte Spivack stated that the book was an "angry work", that ended on a note of futility and despair.

See also

In Spanish: El nombre del mundo es Bosque para niños