The Word for World Is Forest Ursula K. Le Guin
128 pages, Paperback
First published March, 1972
“For if it's all the rest of us who are killed by the suicide, it's himself whom the murderer kills; only he has to do is over, and over, and over.”
In these 128 pages of Science Fiction, there are many quotes that are wise, prophetic, and powerful quotes everywhere. I have thought about this review for a few weeks now. I have been invited to a podcast about this book and worried a bit about saying too much, but I don’t think that is possible. There are lots of places I could start but Ursula K. Leguin deserves our attention and time.
I know most of you know exactly who UKL is but to put her and this novel into context let's start at ground zero. Ursula Krober grew up in Berkeley the daughter of intellectuals, her father has since suffered from a wee bout of cancellation but at one time his name was on UC Berkeley’s Anthropology department that he had a hand in opening.
Being that I am a Philip K. Dick podcaster and researcher the fact that Ursula and Phil were high school classmates in 1947 class at Berkeley high is a curious footnote in SF history. Paintings of them are outside the high school on telephone boxes but they were never as close as those paintings in real life. They traded letters and in 1974 they were nominated for all the major SF awards together but never actually met.
I have written and spoken often about the difference in class between Ursula and Phil, not just from addresses and family life but to education. When she was going to Harvard he was working at the record and roommates with beat poets. There is no correct path to becoming a master of Science Fiction. I think we need The Phils and the Ursulas in Science Fiction.
The Word for World is Forest is a prime example of a novel that Leguin at the time was uniquely in a position to write. Of course, there is a history to this story and it is deeply connected to one of the most important projects of the SF New Wave. Leguin is a writer of the new wave, but her borderline literary SF often is thought of as having more of a Golden Age feel.
Phil actually started publishing close to the tail end of that era but he was also writing books that felt dangerous and new as soon as he was writing novels, most clearly perhaps in the World Jones Made. Leguin is not the gonzo writer that Dick, Malzberg, or even Joanna Russ was. That being said she is important to that era.
To plant the flag for this new subversive era of science fiction and sorta bridge the gap came a single anthology collecting live-wire SF edited by firebrand Harlan Ellison called Dangerous Visions. Ellison was a rising star in the community who was crawling out of windows at the Star Trek offices because his scripts with drug dealing enterprise crew members were way overdue. While avoiding Gene Roddenberry Ellison was also editing his collection. In the 1976 introduction, Leguin gives plenty of credit for influencing the novel and suggesting the title change. Thanks for that Harlan!
Dangerous Visions (This novella was written in the late 60s but appeared in Again, Dangerous Visions was delayed until 1972) is an all-important collection and has to be read to be believed. Among the greatest anthologies, it plays the role that Dark Forces would for horror in the 80s. Leguin in my opinion is a more conventional SF author for this era, but Harlan appeared to pull one of the more directly radical pieces out of Leguin. ‘The Little Green Men’ as she titled it is clearly about the war that America was involved in at the time.
So what do I mean by directly radical? I mean the woman wrote an introduction to Anarchist SF (The Dispossessed) and the master class in Always Coming Home. She wrote the first major SF novel to introduce a non-binary society in The Left Hand of Darkness. Well, this novel is more directly radical because she is more openly making the point than she ever did elsewhere. No metaphor, no analogy, no slow burn development.
Boom. This is anti-Vietnam war, anti-colonialism, and pro-ecology, above all, It is in your face about it. Writing this for the second volume of the anthology might have afforded Leguin a little freedom to be direct, plus in the introduction, she talks about 1968 as a year of great anger for the people opposing the war. One of the things that give Leguin her role is the combination of her parent’s influence, her education, her radical views, and her talent for writing. This novel is an anthropological science fiction statement against colonialism. Awesome.
Re-reading this two weeks after seeing AVATAR: The Way of Water in the theater I know I have to address this. Cameron’s Pandora shares much in common with Leguin’s New Tahiti. Some of the comparisons are overstated, this happens in Science Fiction. Leigh Brackett, CL Moore, and Edgar Rice Burroughs all wrote about a similar Mars. I think Cameron and Leguin’s visions are similar because they are both using the same genre to write about the same evils. I personally am a fan of Cameron and the Avatar movies and have defended them enough that people joke that I am being paid by Cameron…I wish.
One of the arguments I had was with a friend who said Cameron had done nothing that Leguin didn’t do 50 years ago. Setting aside that the set-up of the story is very different. In Le Guin’s novel the scientist can only relate to and learn about the Athsheans, but in Avatar Jake leaves behind his species entirely.
There is a knee-jerk reactionary hatred against Avatar that I personally don’t understand, being angry that his SF tale set on another planet is somehow insulting indigenous people on this planet feels off to me but I am open to the discussion. For whatever reason Leguin gets a pass on this, perhaps it was 50 years ago, she is a leftie SF darling (for good reason) but her parents have a dodgy history on the topic so I am not sure it is equal. I come from the belief that both what Cameron and Leguin are doing are important. Writers need the space to create alien cultures and it is natural they will share some spiritual DNA with human cultures. She does an amazing job of developing their culture including developing the Forty Lands and how the women ran the cities and the dream lodges in very short passages.
Leguin was trying to be respectful and admitted that the tribe the Senoi in Indonesia was very similar to the one she invented who believe dream life is more important. It was an accident, she invented that aspect of alien culture and it happened to be like a real tribe. I personally think she is honoring them in an SF way, a tribe honestly never would have heard of without her book. TWFWIF and Avatar use SF to highlight Indigenous issues, the thing is Avatar has a 2 billion dollar target on its back. Enough about that…
Leguin uses SF to explore the destructive nature not just of colonialism but humanity’s destructive relationship with nature itself. Seen through the eyes in the opening chapter of Captain Davidson a military commander overseeing the occupation of this new world, as far as bad guys go he is as arch as Leguin has ever written, coming off the page as macho as an 80s action movie hero. Davidson is doing whatever he wants because of the distance – he was operating without contact back home.
“…so this world’s going our way. Like it or not, it’s a fact you have to face; it happens to be the way things are.” We get details of this in a short info-dump about the conditions on earth, the best example is the huge animals they hunt, while earth hunters have hunt robodeer because the real ones are long gone. The science of the long-dead earth needed to cross space to harvest wood serves the plot, not logic however it is a metaphor you just need to ride with.
This novel takes place in the Hanish universe (the 5th book in the timeline) that supposes that Humans on earth were one of many offshoot species that were seeded around the galaxy by an ancient race. This novel is fairly on the nose but explores the racism of Colonial control The Athsheans (or Creechies as the name humans use as an insult and dehumanize them with) are basically human just as they developed on this different world. The yumens as the Athsheans know them enslave them for work, and the way they talk about them should be familiar.
“Right, this isn’t slavery. OK, baby. Slaves are human. When you raise cows, you call that slavery? No, it just works…” and “…They don’t feel pain like humans. That’s the part you forget.”
This is the Dreaded Comparison. Considered a seminal book in the fields of Bioethics and Human-Animal Studies in 1988, two decades after Leguin’s novel Marjorie Spiegel wrote a book that compared the slavery of humans and non-humans. There are some that consider this argument racist, but the only way that is true is if you dismiss the suffering and lives of living, breathing animals. Plenty of people wanted to dismiss the lives of animals to keep enslaving them for food, clothing, and experimentation.
One uncomfortable notion this novel puts forward is that slavery is an uncomfortable part of Human's exploitation of the natural world. Most reading the novel will not want to confront this any more than Captain Davidson. That said this part 17 pages into the novel is a lynch-pin point of the message. Five pages later we learn that people on earth so destroyed the natural world it had no choice but to survive through veganism.
“What would they say on old earth if they saw one man eating a kilogram of meat at one meal? Poor damn soybeansuckers!”
As 30 year vegan myself I laughed at this, and I don’t think Leguin in 1968 was calling for veganism or anti-civ changes to our relationship with ecology but it is impossible for me not to read this novel and not see that exact point.
“If the yumens are men, they are unfit or untaught to dream or act as men. Therefore they go about in torment killing and destroying, driven by the gods within, whom they will not set free but try to uproot and deny. If they are men, they are evil men, having denied their own gods, afraid to see their own faces in the dark...”
I like the idea that these people view the human's inability to connect to their dreams as a form of insanity, and a reason for their disconnect to nature. For whatever reason, it is a reality in this novel (and our real world) that most humans have no ability to connect to nature. They thoughtlessly use and consume nature with the secondary disconnection of capitalism but this novel is very much about highlighting that disconnection. That point is powerfully made over and over some times with a scalpel but often with a hammer…
“I don't know what 'human nature' is. Maybe leaving descriptions of what we wipe out is part of human nature—Is it much pleasanter for an ecologist, really?”
This all comes to head when the events of a novel that Leguin had yet to release (for another 6 years) in The Dispossessed makes communication with earth possible. A supply ship arrives and finds the native peoples who were thought to be peaceful to a fault have murdered their first human and are fighting back. Earth is not happy, the corporations what humans to respectfully occupy the world. Is that enough of a change? Can human nature really change? Can they adapt and survive?
In a conversation, the ecologist Lyubov tells the colonizers the harsh truth. First invokes Alaska and the first famine, we don’t get an explanation, beyond that, an excellent piece of world-building that suggest just enough. Then we get the mission statement of the novel. There is a reason Harlan Ellison suggested this title change.
“A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest. I submit, commander Yung, that though the colony may not be in imminent danger the planet is-"
This is a classic for good reason. Leguin was never more in your face with the message and it makes a good entry point for her work. She has escaped this world before the fate that she hints at in this book but anyone still reading this review might still face that future. As is true with most of Leguin’s work you would be smart to listen to her and think about how you can make the world a better place.
Berkeley High year book I found at the library...
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