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morenowagain's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Graphic: War, Xenophobia, Slavery, Sexual violence, Sexual assault, Colonisation, Violence, Murder, Sexism, Drug use, Rape, Racism, Gun violence, Gore, Genocide, and Death
itsnotsarah's review
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
3.0
Graphic: Death, Genocide, Gun violence, Colonisation, Racism, Slavery, War, and Xenophobia
Moderate: Misogyny and Sexism
Minor: Sexual violence, Sexual assault, and Rape
trailmixraisins's review
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Graphic: Fire/Fire injury, Genocide, Murder, Colonisation, Sexual harassment, Slavery, War, Xenophobia, Violence, and Death
Moderate: Confinement, Alcohol, Blood, Drug use, Misogyny, Torture, Grief, Physical abuse, Rape, Sexual violence, and Sexual assault
Minor: Gun violence, Emotional abuse, Racism, Injury/Injury detail, and Sexism
laimab's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.75
1) Dr. Lyubov, a sort of anthropologist eager to understand how the Ashtheans lived. However, his learnings were used to take advantage of the Ashtheans, against his will.
2) Davidson, a racist and prepotent military man. A truly unlikable character that we're forced to follow. Every time a chapter was from his perspective we would get introduced to a disgusting bias of race and species. He was intolerant of other humanoid species, like the Urrasti and Hainish, and also intolerant of Asian and European Terrans.
3) Selver, an Ashthean who, due to immense sorrow in witnessing his planet being destroyed and his wife violently killed, adopted violence as a means of defence.
Ashtheans were profoundly changed by their interaction with their colonisers. As a society, they got introduced to violence that started against the colonizers and remained in their society, from then on between each other. We witness Selver becoming insane because of grief and rage. We witnessed a species that was the epitome of peaceful resort to large-scale organised violence. This transformation affects Selver intimately, affecting even his "dream-time", now haunted by Dr. Lyubov. It's sad to see how a good, fair intention led to the corruption of souls. In the journey to justice, to peace, he had to resort to extreme violence, corrupting his peaceful existence.
I think that this is a great lesson on resistance movements, and about how when you engage in resistance, to defend your integrity or of those around you, to act on what you believe in, you are also changed and affected by the injustice. It makes you colder and it taints you. Even when you reach the objective, the violence remains in you. Through memories that won't easily go away due to the way you had to go beyond what you believe in, the way you had to make yourself be understood by using the "enemy's" methods.
Graphic: Colonisation
Moderate: Sexism and Sexual assault
sunkissedcat's review against another edition
3.5
Graphic: Xenophobia, Genocide, Violence, and Murder
Moderate: Sexism, Misogyny, Slavery, and Gun violence
Minor: Drug use and Rape
becksusername's review
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Graphic: Drug abuse, Physical abuse, Colonisation, Genocide, Gun violence, Kidnapping, Violence, Rape, Racism, Injury/Injury detail, War, Vomit, Sexism, Torture, Blood, Murder, Slavery, Confinement, Death, Drug use, and Fire/Fire injury
tonyhonk's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Graphic: Death, War, Xenophobia, and Genocide
Moderate: Rape, Slavery, and Sexism
Minor: Misogyny
keegan_leech's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Extended Discussion
- Le Guin's essay "The Carrier-Bag Theory of Fiction", and
- James Cameron's Avatar films.
The Word for World is Forest (which I'll call Forest) focuses on the psychological and social impacts of colonisation. A central focus of the book is how the Athsheans, the story's indigenous people, are changed not just by the acts committed by the colonising humans, but by their acts of resistance. The actual fighting is almost entirely glossed over in favour of this focus on its impact. Le Guin is interested in exploring the lasting societal violence of colonisation, the damage that remains long after bodies have been buried and forests regrown.
She was thinking of the US war in Vietnam as she wrote Forest, and the parallels are clear. Some of the events in the story are clearly inspired by atrocities such as the My Lai massacre, and the environmental destruction in the novella mirrors the deliberate razing of forests by the US during that war. Even the reaction of humans on Earth who find out about events on Athshe after light-years of delay has parallels to the response to events in Vietnam from Americans an ocean away. Decades later, Le Guin's questions are still pertinent. Unexploded ordinance[1] still litters Vietnam, Cambodia, and neighbouring countries. The tonnes of napalm, agent orange, and other chemicals which the US dumped on South East Asia still have lingering impacts on the people and the environment still there. And that's to say nothing of the societal impact that lingers after the war. Even the United States is still reeling from the impact of a war it fought entirely on foreign soil.
Compare this to Avatar. Cameron seems less interested in the impacts of colonisation, and more in the cool sci-fi battles he gets to orchestrate between humans in mech suits and aliens with spears. Between the first Avatar film and its sequel, the planet of Pandora has essentially been reset to the state it was in when everything kicked off. Sure, good old American boy, and white-saviour protagonist Jake Sully is now considered a member of the indigenous Na'avi, but aside from his presence (and a few ruined mechs rusting in the forest) the Na'avi have gone back to their way of life as though the horrors of the first film were nothing more than a bad dream. The perfect backdrop for another CGI-fuelled action blockbuster!
Cameron has been (rightly) criticised online[2] for saying around the time of the first Avatar's release[3] that the Lakota Sioux may have "fought a lot harder" against their own colonisation if they could have seen their own future (in a particularly offensive aside he referred to the Lakota Sioux as "a dead-end society"). These comments (and his films) suggest that Cameron thinks the impacts of colonisation could be erased, prevented, or undone if colonised peoples had simply fought hard enough against them. Nowhere is Le Guin's acknowledgement of how even a successful anti-colonial struggle will not undo the violence that is inherent in colonisation.
It's in these differing presentations that "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" can be found. It's an essay in which Le Guin discusses storytelling, gender, and human society. The eponymous "carrier bag" is a reference to her distinction between stories of early human societies surviving by the strength of the hunter who returns with the flesh of the mammoth to feed his tribe, and the untold but much more realistic story of the carrier bag filled one at a time with foraged mushrooms. Le Guin sees the focus in fiction on heroic battles, masculine warriors, and heart-pounding excitement as an omission of the real foundations of human society, and the work which keeps societies alive. She urges storytellers to shift their focus to the carrier bag, the overlooked (often feminine) labour which underpin human societies.
In case it's unclear, Cameron seems to embody exactly the kind of storytelling that "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" opposes. He is an uncurious sensationalist, interested only in the spectacle and drama of whatever action he's able to fit onscreen. His sci-fi colonisation story is really little more than a pretty backdrop for this spectacle. Le Guin, on the other hand is interested in the personal and the social consequences of the violence she depicts. Forest is science-fiction at its best: it uses it explores the history and politics of the world it was written in by mirroring and exaggerating that world in fiction.
The novella has its flaws. I think that her treatment of her indigenous protagonists in particular is imperfect. Le Guin may not be James Cameron, whose films are almost laughable for their repetition of white saviour and noble savage tropes; she is even relatively ahead of her time as a white author writing in the 1970s. But there is a certain simplicity to the society she has created which does it a disservice. It's nothing egregious, and perhaps it's a side-effect of this being a relatively short story, but I imagine indigenous readers might find her depiction of the Athsheans too shallow. Her explorations of gender are also not as interesting as those found in, for example, The Left Hand of Darkness or her Earthsea novels. But there are aspects of ideas found in those novels and "Carrier Bag" to be seen here.
Conclusion
[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-vietnam-war-is-still-killing-people
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Indigenous/comments/znivxa/so_avatars_james_cameron_referred_to_the_lakota/
[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/apr/18/avatar-james-cameron-brazil-dam
Graphic: Violence, Racism, Death, and Colonisation
Moderate: Sexual assault, Sexism, Rape, Fire/Fire injury, Sexual violence, and Murder
Minor: Drug abuse, Xenophobia, Drug use, and Racial slurs
ulespiegel's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Graphic: Colonisation, Violence, War, and Slavery
Minor: Sexism, Rape, Racism, and Xenophobia
selectedfictions's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
Minor: Murder, Slavery, Xenophobia, Rape, Sexism, and Colonisation