This Ursula K. Le Guin classic is a short and bittersweet parable-like story. She uses vivid and explicit depictions of colonialism in the setting of an alien planet years in the future where humans have developed the technology to travel through space. Selver, an Athshean man, and his society are irrevocably changed after humans settle the planet to harvest wood to be sold on Earth. Though ultimately hopeful, the toll of human violence and hatred on the non-violent society puts its continued existence in jeopardy.

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issyharvey's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
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

I'm always a fan of Le Guin's writing and will definitely be rereading this piece again and again.

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johnpfromkc's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging emotional mysterious sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Good message but it was a little too "on the nose."

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laimab's review against another edition

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adventurous reflective tense medium-paced

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

Another interesting story by Ursula K. Le Guin but for me, it was a bit underwhelming considering her other novels. In "The Word for World in Forest" we are presented with 3 different perspectives on the violent event of colonisation of a world, Athshea. As colonisation in the real world, this involved fiercely exploiting resources – trees for wood, an expensive commodity for a destroyed and infertile Terra, alongside using forced native work.

Curiously, the enslavement of Athsheans was officially a Voluntary action. The truth of what was going on in Athshea was censored and undermined. It seemed as if Terrans had learnt nothing from the destruction of their own planet. The 3 perspectives introduced are:
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.

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kimsa's review against another edition

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dark emotional hopeful sad

4.75

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ka_cam's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

A heart wrenching and thought provoking read. I was impressed how she introduced complex characters, relationships, and ideologies in a short time. Deeply flawed characters navigate themes of violence, humanity/inhumanity, colonization, reality, subconscious, gender, cultural difference, self defense and more. Ultimately tragic.

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keegan_leech's review against another edition

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challenging dark reflective fast-paced

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

I read this a couple of months ago now and I'm still thinking about it so let's get into why. Le Guin is a genius. If you just want a simple recommendation: Absolutely just go read this novella, and all her other writing while you're at it. Can't recommend her highly enough. There are certainly criticisms to be made of the novella, although its flaws don't make it less worthy of discussion or interest. The rest of this is just my thoughts on the book in more detail.

Extended Discussion

I have thought a lot about this novel in the context of two other works:

Le Guin's essay "The Carrier-Bag Theory of Fiction", and
James Cameron's Avatar films.

I think these make interesting (if not worthwhile, in the case of Avatar) companion pieces to the novella.

The Avatar connection is an easy one: both those films and this story are essentially sci-fi metaphors for real-world colonialism. Both revolve around far future humans who colonise a distant planet to strip it of a rare resource, which is essentially important only as a MacGuffin to drive the story. In the process, the indigenous people of the world are violently subjugated, their cultural values threatened, and eventually (minor spoiler)

both fight back the incursion by humans

. There's even a human sympathetic to the indigenous people who comes to understand some of their culture, and assists them in their fight. However, the two stories treat their subject matter very differently, and that comes across in the telling of the stories.

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

This hasn't really been a review so much as a comparative essay. Sorry I guess, but I needed to get these thoughts out somehow. If these ideas interested you then I promise this novella is interesting for much more than its comparisons to Avatar. Le Guin's writing is rich with thematic content, and thought-provoking questions. I adore writing which challenges and provokes, and Le Guin (as always) delivers in spades. It's not perfect, but this novella expands the bounds of literature, in worthwhile and fascinating ways.

[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

Content Warnings

bradblaz's review against another edition

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dark emotional hopeful

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

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