"The Word for World is Forest" Angry, Heavy-Handed, but Still Good

 

    This is by far, the angriest book I have ever seen from Ursula K. Le Guin, and it kind of works. Don't get me wrong, the Vietnam War allegory is very, very thick. Like almost hilariously so. I'm not even an expert on the Vietnam war, but the "very definitely human" shorter species who live exclusively in forests and fight back using guerilla-style warfare is very on the nose. Yet I still liked it? It felt decidedly significantly less sci-fi than other Usrula K. Le Guin novels, and honestly could have simply been in separate continuity and very little would have changed. Let's talk about it.

    Let me get this out of the way very quickly. The noble savage trope is very much well and alive with the Athsheans, there's no other way to cut it. Their people view Terrans as these backwards creatures, who are oddly hairless, and have no strong connection to the Earth. They have this "mystical" way of dreaming that is so foreign to humans that even the most open minded of them can hardly comprehend it truly, and they live among the tree's, considering their entire world to be a giant forest, hence the title. 

    However, I do think this novel does attempt to critique this trope or flip it on it's head in some ways though. I do not think Le Guin is simply writing this trope without care for the concept of colonialism, like I said the Vietnam War allegory is very obvious. Firstly, the ending is very depressing. I thought this novel was going to be much longer than it ended up being, but the Athsheans very handily win, yet they're such broken people by the end. Salver is only a god because he's introduced these people people to the concept of death. He's been "enlightened' and "re-educated," but at the cost of completely eroding the culture his people had built. As he put it he was seen as a god, and the physical scars he has represent the changes he's undergone. He's translated this new language of death and killing to his people, and now that's all they know and dream of.

    It's a depressing story, and significantly more pessimistic than what Le Guin usually writes. Even in the gloomiest of her stories it involves people triumphing at a heavy cost, or realizing the error of their ways. In her stories Le Guin usually has the character be an anthropologist or something similar to that, to help readers learn more about these new cultures she's developing, but you only get a couple chapters of Lyubov before he becomes othered by everyone and is a shell of himself. 

    Like in other stories by Le Guin this one feels decidedly grounded. They introduce the ansible but its quickly destroyed, and Le Guin removes any sort of threat from space quite quickly. Really if this was just about a group of loggers discovering a new species on Earth and ruining them you might be able to make it work. Like Davidson is almost like evil incarnate. You read his chapter and immediately start hoping he's dead by the end of the story. He's sexist, the humans he comes with love drugs, he literally rapes what is basically a furry green human that everyone else describes as child-like thanks to their size. Oh and did I mention he's like oddly racist and thinks that they need to keep the slaves?

    Like how could you possibly be still normal human racist when your species can travel the stars, and there are dozens of other humanoid species anyways? If you were racist to humanoids from other planets I could understand but how are you still hung up on whether someone is just human Asian? At the very least Davidson is swiftly defeated and doesn't really have too many tactical victories, which might be an issue depending on what you prefer as a reader. Do not get me wrong, this story has conflict, but it's decidedly one-sided in favour of the Athsheans. This book is much more interested in the fallout of the brutality then actually describing said brutality, which makes sense given the inspiration.

Final Score: 70/100

    I think your mileage may vary with this book depending on how much you're willing to tolerate the very thinly-veiled criticism of the Vietnam war. Like other than the fact that the Athsheans have some special powers to kill themselves on command and greater control of their dreams you could pretty safely replace them with like Vietnamese people. I mean at the end Davidson literally starts complaining about how much you can only trust white humans it's hard to ignore. I just think this story, while good, is less interesting than a City of Illusions, and especially The Dispossessed, which I still think is her best work. It still is a decent story that Le Guin manages to make work within her usual framework that she's used for the Hainish Cycle. I just thought there'd be a little more with this story, both thematically and word count-wise.