The Word for World Is Forest

The Word for World is Forest is a tightly plotted novella, pitting genocidal Terran humans against a species of gentle forest dwelling hominids. Athshe/New Tahiti is a world covered in trees, where a few thousand Terrans use slavery to clear cut the forest and ship lumber back to a nearly lifeless Terra.

One of our viewpoints is Captain Davidson, a parody of the macho imperialist, a man of crude appetites who sees the local “creechies” as little more than animals to be exterminated. His rape and murder of one of the females inspires the other major viewpoint, Selver, to lead his people in a war against the humans. The anti-imperialist plot (written in the twilight of the Vietnam War) is well done, but Le Guin is not a military fetishist.

Her true interests lie with Selver and the Athsheans. Their society is one that has almost eliminated violence, cultivating the ability to have waking-dreams. Le Guin clearly means something deep by this, but her gestures at the grandness of world-time and dream-time didn’t quite connect for me. What works is the idea of Selver as a god, as he brings the idea of war and systematic murder into Athshe, and one line, a perfect epigram, “If a suicide kills everyone else, then the murderer kills himself.”