The Word for World is Forest

"It’s set on a planet that has been colonised by Terrans—people from Earth, in the interspecies Hainish Cycle—but there are indigenous people on this planet, who are humanoid but look distinctly different. They are furred, they’re much shorter in stature, and their pigmentation is green. The colonists regard them as subhuman and they’re enslaved: forced into labour camps to participate in a forestry project. That’s why the humans are there: to harvest the forests and take them back to Earth. The indigenous civilisation has a culture in which they never kill one another. Initially the indigenous people extend that to the colonisers as well, whereas the colonisers use all kinds of horrific violence to force the indigenous to labour. This novella was first published in 1972, and it seems very clear that it relates to America’s occupation of Vietnam at that time because, in addition to deforesting the planet, one of the things they use to attack the indigenous people is called ‘burning jelly.’ So that’s directly evoking the imperialism of the US Army of the time. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . There’s an uprising among the indigenous people, and eventually they force the colonists to leave. But at the end there’s an, again, ambiguous—I think Le Guin is very good at ambiguity—ending. The indigenous people have been successful in forcing the colonists to leave and stop killing their forests. But they’ve also changed their culture as a result of this contact. The possibility that humans (that is, the local people) can kill one another now exists within their culture, and we’re left wondering what that means for their future. Is it a polemic? I don’t know if I would say that. What I would say is that it’s sort of vocalised through two characters. One is an indigenous character and the other is the most militant and aggressive of the human characters, who continues with a sort of retribution against the indigenous people even after he’s ordered to stop by his command structure. His voice is very much a caricature. It’s a very one-dimensional character, who’s continually fantasising about violence against women, violence against the natives… he’s obsessed with his own notion of masculinity. So I think he’s not a well-developed character, and the choice to give voice to the point of view of the colonisers was not particularly successful. But I don’t know if it’s a polemic in that I don’t think it is controversial. But then, I’m very sympathetic to the decolonising point of view. Absolutely. That’s a very important aspect of Le Guin’s approach to science fiction. In this novel in particular, one of the things about her representation of the indigenous people is that they get new knowledge through dreaming. For them, dreaming is a serious ontological and epistemological practice; dreaming and material space are deeply related. This is something that’s consistent with a lot of North American indigenous beliefs, so she’s drawing on that. I know that some people will have concerns that she’s not indigenous, yet she’s drawing on indigenous tradition, and I have mixed feelings about that myself. I think we now have much greater consciousness of citational practices—that one needs to credit the indigenous thinkers who are the holders and developers of these ideas. In terms of that moment in the 1970s when she published this, though, I still want to give her some credit for bringing that worldview into the sort-of mainstream, in a way that takes it very seriously. “She’s very sensitive to the notion that our ideologies and values are embedded in the language we use” Even the title: The Word for World is Forest . In the indigenous point of view, you don’t regard trees as resources. You can’t cut down all the trees and still have a world. It’s a much more ecologically minded way of living with other species. Not overharvesting, not destroying. A lot of reasons that people turn to indigenous thought now is that we’re in an environmental crisis produced by extractive capitalism. People are suddenly thinking that maybe indigenous people had some better ideas about how to live with and sustain the ecologies around them. That’s very much part of the worldview and language she imagines for the indigenous people in this novel. That’s very typical of Le Guin overall, too. Like in The Dispossessed , there are huge language differences. She invents a new language for the anarchist society, basically, because she’s very sensitive to the notion that our ideologies and values are embedded in the language and metaphors we use."

"I’m not really a big science fiction fan, but this book was recommended to me a few years back and I thought I would give it a try. I don’t know if you’ve seen the film Avatar , but as far as I can see it seems to be pretty much the same story, except that the film has a happy ending and the book doesn’t. It’s an allegory about the human destruction of nature, and all the things we have been talking about. It’s a colonisation story set on a planet called Athshe, colonised by human loggers, and is set at a stage in the future when humans have destroyed all the biodiversity on earth. They’re all eating vat-grown beef and living in bubbles, and have to find other planets to log because there aren’t any trees left. Athshe has an indigenous population – very much an allegory of the kind of thing that is happening in the Amazon and elsewhere – which is treated like slaves by the humans. They have an ethic of peace, speak to each other only through dreams, and don’t initially resist the brutal colonisers, but eventually a rebellion brews. Controversially, they decide to break with their tradition of non-violence and fight back. Eventually the human loggers are driven out, which is exactly what happens in Avatar . But the book has a slightly darker twist, because by driving the humans out the indigenous people have changed their own way of life and start to adopt violent solutions to things, which they had never done before. So you’re left with the impression at the end that although they have been successful in defending their planet, they have also planted the seed of violence in themselves that is going to have consequences in the future. What you get from this book is a very dark view of a certain type of human nature. It is interesting in the context of this discussion of civilisation because it challenges the idea of benevolent humanity. The humans are seen in this book almost entirely as a negative force. Broadly speaking, the aspect of humanity that you see is resource-grabbing colonisation – which of course is what all human societies have done throughout history. So it is a colonial allegory as well as an ecological one."

"So this is part of Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle , which is a shared world more than a series, and this novella can completely stand alone. It follows a human logging company on a small planet that’s covered in ocean and a few islands covered in forest. They’ve cut down all the trees on Earth, so they are excited to come and grab at these resources and send them home to make a lot of money. The conflict is that there are people living on the planet already in the forests. The logging companies immediately start exploiting them for labor and various other abuses. These very peaceful people who have lived sustainably with their forests, one of them snaps and decides to fight back and eventually, there’s a violent overthrow of the logging company and they get shoved back off the planet. It’s not really a happy ending because as the native people discuss amongst themselves at the end, now they’ve accepted violence into their society, which they haven’t before. So again, this is a mirror. It’s a look at how colonizers and especially resource companies—like mining and logging companies—abuse both the land and the people living on the land, and shows us how harmful that attitude could be in space. Yes, she is famous for a reason. One thing that I found kind of fascinating is how well she captures the mindset of the bad guys. The bad guy in this case is one of the colonels in charge of protecting the logging company. He completely dehumanizes the native people living on the planet, who are descended from the same genetics as humans. They’re related to humans, but he completely dehumanizes them and you can see that in his internal narrative and his point-of-view chapters. It’s horrifying how well Le Guin captures this. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The same way that Butler can capture the different mindsets of different characters, Le Guin also does a really good job capturing the nice guy on the bad guy side. There’s an anthropologist working with the humans who is studying the native people. He thinks that he is being helpful and that he is treating them humanely, but he is also part of a bad system that is exploiting them and he is not doing anything about that. That’s a great perspective to show too. So yes, she does a good job of showing the different viewpoints in this scenario. This is something that’s fascinating about fiction in general—especially science fiction, because you can get into all sorts of different constructed scenarios. Fiction lets us inhabit the mentalities of people other than ourselves, and people with different ideologies than ourselves. This can be really useful to teach us things—the point of view of the people that we dismiss, for example, which is super important. I’m looking forward to reading more science fiction about space colonization by indigenous people in particular. Also, it’s pretty well-known that hard science fiction especially tends to be more dominated by male authors. That bothers me because I love reading books by diverse authors. This is probably partly my own fault of not making enough effort to find more of them, but I would love to read more stories about what it would be like, good or bad, to settle space from a bigger variety of science fiction authors. I made an effort! At the same time, I think science fiction is also a useful tool for inhabiting the mindset of people whose mindsets we shouldn’t copy. It helps us understand how they got to where they are, how they think about other people and the environment, and how we can either try to communicate with them or protect vulnerable people against these kinds of ideologies. When I wrote my own book , I started to feel that (among other things) it makes a great list of writing prompts for sci-fi authors. Not that sci-fi authors need prompts, they are doing a great job already. But even for myself—because I write science fiction as a hobby—there are so many stories from history that I hadn’t thought about in a sci-fi context before, and so many different ways to put conflict in your stories. Stories are built out of conflict, and all these questions that I ask in my book are about how we would handle these things in real life. So I hope my book is useful for people in real life who are building a better future in space, but I think it’s also going to be interesting to see if any sci-fi authors get inspired by some of these real-world questions."