The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin (1972)
I like this novella very much, so if parts of my review seem harsh it’s only because I found the story so stimulating. When I say it’s a brilliant, beautiful, but tragic lament, culminating disappointingly in a retreat to the comforts of Western liberalism, I’m not consigning it to the flames. It is well worth reading, perhaps even up there with The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness.
The storyworld
The setting is an Earth-like planet of ocean and forest, in the early years of its colonization by people from Earth, the Terrans, who have named it New Tahiti. Until their arrival it had not known industry, agriculture, environmental exploitation, oppression, or social conflict. It is a pristine wilderness, all the land covered in a forest of oak, ash, hazel, cedar, etc.—it turns out that the planet was seeded a long time ago by the super-advanced Hainish civilization with the same plant and animal progenitors as on Earth.
Earth, we learn, has been reduced to a toxic dump; New Tahiti represents something of a new start. But the first order of business is to cut down the trees and ship them back to Earth, where timber is worth more than gold. Next, the plan is to farm the cleared land intensively and create a world fit for Terrans. Whether stripping the forests away is likely to support a sustainable agriculture, and whether the native inhabitants are happy with all this, are questions the Terrans are mostly unconcerned with.
Among those native inhabitants are the Athsheans (the planet’s local name is Athshe), an intelligent but apparently passive species with green fur, known by the colonizers as “creechies.” Most of the Terrans, led by the sadistic Captain Davidson, see the Athsheans as subhuman and feel fully entitled to use them as slave labour in their logging operations—and to abuse, rape, and murder them at will. When Raj Lyubov, the colony’s anthropologist, points out that the “creechies” are actually a human species, close cousins of ours descended from the same original Hainish seed species, the Terrans don’t want to know.
I said it was a pristine wilderness, but when the story moves away from the logging stations and into the forest to join the Athsheans, it comes to feel more like a garden. This is a peace-loving people with complex traditions that enable them to live harmoniously with each other and with their environment.
We are gradually introduced to the rich culture and spirituality of the Athsheans through Lyubov, whose anthropological work has brought him to a fascinated appreciation of this simultaneously familiar and strange species.
Later, the focus moves to Selver, an Athshean who decides to break with his people’s traditional taboos and lead his people into violent resistance.
Preachy
The first impression is of a simple anti-imperialist allegory for the Vietnam War. Le Guin is angered and outraged by the atrocities perpetrated by the US in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. She does not flinch from showing us the horrors and abuses. When she is not shocking us into anger she is moving us to tears for the suffering of innocent people.
For a moment I worried that it would turn out to be too on-the-nose, too manichean—the bad guys too one-dimensionally bad, the good guys too cuddly, innocent, and romanticized. There seemed to be none of the complexity of The Dispossessed, in which the anarchist planet, though it’s the one that gets Le Guin’s sympathy, is no utopian paradise. This, by contrast, felt like a hippie fantasy.
But that’s not quite right. Complexity builds as we progress through the story. I’m allergic to fiction with a message, but somehow she won me over. I say somehow, but I know how. It’s her writing: masterful, controlled, intelligent, and humane. And, surprisingly for such a polemical work, subtle. The allegory is explicit, the anti-imperialist points made with hammer-blows, but by the end the feeling is of a complex story that manages to do much more in a hundred pages than many more recent SF authors do in three or four hundred.
Captain Davidson
Davidson is a cartoon villain. Le Guin knew this when writing it, but she allowed her unconscious to go where it wanted, as she explains in the introduction:
But Davidson is, though not uncomplex, pure; he is purely evil — and I don’t, consciously, believe purely evil people exist. But my unconscious has other opinions.
“Not uncomplex,” if you’re really paying attention, perhaps. But he does come across as a one-dimensional antagonist. Again, it’s a testament to her writing that we don’t perceive this as detracting from the story.
As someone said the other day on TPF:
I’m not sure how she gets away with it, but I think part of it is that she’s so smart, you trust her and want to listen. We’re used to preaching from people who shouldn’t — so there’s a sort of double offense — but I just don’t seem to mind being preached to by her, which is an odd experience.
Inventing a people
For such a short allegorical polemic, it has a remarkable density of world-building. And it’s not merely decorative—it allows us to see the Athsheans as more than either subhuman “creechies” or passive, helpless victims. Le Guin constructs an anthropology that turns these weird aliens into a people.
She does this in many ways, but I’ll point out three.
1. Touch
There is a remarkable passage about touch:
Touch was a main channel of communication among the forest people. Among Terrans touch is always likely to imply threat, aggression, and so for them there is often nothing between the formal handshake and the sexual caress. All that blank was filled by the Athsheans with varied customs of touch. Caress as signal and reassurance was as essential to them as it is to mother and child or to lover and lover; but its significance was social, not only maternal and sexual. It was part of their language. It was therefore patterned, codified, yet infinitely modifiable. “They’re always pawing each other,” some of the colonists sneered, unable to see in these touch-exchanges anything but their own eroticism which, forced to concentrate itself exclusively on sex and then repressed and frustrated, invades and poisons every sensual pleasure, every humane response: the victory of a blinded, furtive Cupid over the great brooding mother of all the seas and stars, all the leaves of trees, all the gestures of men, Venus Genetrix …
So Selver came forward with his hands held out, shook Lyubov’s hand Terran fashion, and then took both his arms with a stroking motion just above the elbow. He was not much more than half Lyubov’s height, which made all gestures difficult and ungainly for both of them, but there was nothing uncertain or childlike in the touch of his small, thin-boned, green-furred hand on Lyubov’s arms. It was a reassurance. Lyubov was very glad to get it.
It’s significant that she says “It was part of their language.” Language for the Athsheans is embodied and experiential, whereas for the Terrans it is managerial and instrumental, an arm of the administered society.
She makes this clear in the most effective way, later on…
2. Language
There is a moment towards the end so jarring that it reveals, all at once, the depth of Le Guin’s linguistic control. And this is easy to forget, because her writing is so often transparent, stylistically restrained, and solemn, with apparently little linguistic playfulness or experimentation.
After many pages spent with Selver and the other Athsheans, whose simple yet profound language gradually recalibrates the reader’s own rhythms of thought, one of the Terrans—the planet’s military commander, Colonel Dongh—speaks to Selver:
“Now the first thing is,” he said when they were all settled, the yumens standing, Selver’s people squatting or sitting on the damp, soft oak-leafmold, “the first thing is that I want first to have a working definition of just precisely what these terms of yours mean and what they mean in terms of guaranteed safety of my personnel under my command here.”
(p.87)
The bureaucratic language is almost physically painful, an abrupt re-entry into the conceptual world of administration, hierarchy, and control. In evoking the tranquil life of the Athsheans, Le Guin had not wandered off into a fairy-world; she set up the contrast very deliberately.
And the deeper point is that language itself is part of the apparatus of domination. Dongh’s language is positivist, striving for specifications and definitive plans. Reality must be rendered in administrative terms before it can be understood. Le Guin’s linguistic magic here is not only stylistic but also epistemological, emphasizing the contrast between two ways of experiencing and knowing the world.
3. Dream-time
For the Athsheans, dream-time vs. waking-time is not a distinction between the unreal and the real. Both are equally valid modes of experience, both equally real. They have integrated dreaming into their lives and culture in a way completely alien to the Terrans, who just see them as lazy, lacking in energy and agency. In fact, the Athsheans have a different daily rhythm, pausing to sleep or to “daydream,” as the Terrans put it, every few hours.
But this is more than an anthropological enrichment designed to bring life and intelligence to the “creechies,” and get us on their side; it’s also a structural element of the plot. Their dreams reveal to them what is happening and what they have to do. It turns out that the conceptual world of the Athsheans, in which the boundary between the real and the unreal doesn’t line up with that of the Terrans, is not just empty mysticism: Le Guin gives her speculative premise real narrative substance.
With works that so deftly weave plot and anthropology, fantasy and real science, it surprises me that Le Guin is sometimes regarded as soft SF.
Hard science fiction?
Some commentators on SF literature use the term “hard SF” to designate fiction with lots of physics, mathematics, and computer science—maybe the space opera of Vernor Vinge is a good example. For a long time I’ve denounced this as a wayward usage, one that diverges from the term’s traditional meaning.
Although anthropology and sociology are sometimes regarded as soft sciences, in contrast with the hard sciences of physics, chemistry, and biology, it’s debatable whether soft and hard in science fiction traditionally align with that distinction. Hardness in science fiction doesn’t mean “physics, not sociology.” Rather, it means disciplined speculation grounded in a systematic understanding of reality. We assign the label of “hard SF” to a story when its imagined developments and discoveries are grounded in science, whether the science is anthropology or fundamental physics.
There is evidence for this in the history of the genre. I don’t think it’s controversial to say that one of the exemplars of classic hard SF is Isaac Asimov, and his most famous creation is the Foundation series, which centres around a fictitious science called psychohistory. All the science in these books is social science.
If this is right, Asimov, Vinge, and Le Guin are all hard SF.
But I’ve changed my mind. Starting with the instinct that Le Guin ought to be taken seriously as a writer whose speculations are intelligently extrapolated from real-life systematic knowledge, there are two ways to go. I could say, according to the argument I’ve just set out, that she is hard SF after all and everyone these days is misusing the term.
Or I could say that hard SF is not scientifically serious enough to contain her: hard SF is not hard enough.
Although Asimov’s Foundation centres around social science, it is a mathematized social science, that is, a social science supposedly raised up to the level of physics and thereby hardened. It reminds me of Engineer’s Syndrome, which…
refers to the tendency of people with an engineering mindset (thinking about things from a technical angle and often in terms of systems) to believe that because they’re really, really good at engineering-related tasks, they are also good at (and understand) everything else.
— Colin Wright (Engineer’s Disease)
This is a fallacy. In Asimov’s case, the prediction of history using mathematics is little more than an Enlightenment fantasy, originating at the moment when the zeitgeist suggested that even chaos might yield to calculation. It is an inheritance of nineteenth-century positivism, a mashup of Auguste Comte and James Clerk Maxwell. People are particles or molecules, societies are thermodynamic systems, and history is governed by mathematical probability. Inconvenient human reality just disappears if you zoom out far enough.
Le Guin does not indulge in such naive Enlightenment fantasies. Her speculative social science is mature enough to reflect real social science, facing up to the considerable unknowability of human systems. Thus her fiction is arguably superior even just in hard SF terms: the speculation is grounded in actual science, abandoning the positivism that was discredited and long-ago abandoned by sociologists and anthropologists.
It comes down to politics. In rejecting the Golden Age’s Enlightenment fantasies, Le Guin’s fiction also rejects the technocratic optimism of mid-century American modernity and its underlying ideology of manifest destiny. More deeply, she rejects the urge for mastery engendered by the Enlightenment.
Le Guin goes in for some of the classic hard SF tropes herself. Functioning in literary terms a lot like faster-than-light travel is the ansible, a device that allows instant communication across any distance. But even when a science-fictional device is not disciplined by plausible extrapolation from existing knowledge, it need not be dismissed as “mere” escapism. Le Guin in fact defended escapism more than once. For example, she wrote that “The direction of escape is toward freedom” (here). The big difference is that Golden Age science fiction and hard SF were usually providing an escape, not towards freedom, but into fantasies of triumph and control.
Problems
Excellent as the story is, I have criticisms. I realize that the following interpretation might be an uncharitable exaggeration, and my only reply to that is a non-reply: as Adorno used to say, only exaggeration is true.
In a nutshell, despite the remarkable anthropology and despite their resistance movement, the Athsheans are ultimately victims to be pitied, rather than historical agents to be joined in solidarity. When it comes to the crunch, the reader is expected to follow Le Guin herself in identifying primarily with the benevolent Hainish overseers, who represent the enlightened liberalism in which Le Guin and most of her readers feel at home. The Athsheans remain fully Other—once exotic, naive and primitive, later tragically corrupted by an insufficiently liberal Terran humanity. In the end, the Hainish—who I’m tempted to refer to as the galaxy’s liberal elite—are the only real hope.
These complaints might seem a bit abstract, but the issues become concrete and obvious in the character of Captain Davidson. That he’s a cartoon villain, a figure of absolute evil, might be bad enough from a literary point of view, but it’s worse than that. Look at how he functions—as the bad apple. In his individual wickedness, he is the convenient exculpation for structural wickedness. A more radical critique of colonialism would attack the system. As it is, the attack is softened: imperialism and colonialism are bad only insofar as they provide a space, far removed from the constraints of liberal civilization, for evil psychopaths to exploit and abuse the weak. For a substantial part of the book we are encouraged to think, once the ansible gets the dumb nasty soldiers under the control of the intellectuals, everything will be fine.
For those who believe that imperialism and colonialism are intrinsically exploitative and abusive, not accidentally so owing to a few bad actors, this is disappointing. A Marxist would say that it perfectly demonstrates the weakness of anarchism—the politics Le Guin was most sympathetic to. That is, it relies on liberal moralism and thus fails to sustain a systematic critique of the status quo. This is exactly what we see in The Word for World Is Forest: the horrors of oppression and exploitation brilliantly evoked, then blamed on a few bad apples.
“A Marxist would likely say” is a cop-out, of course, but it signals something real, namely the discomfort I feel passing down sectarian judgements on works of art. This is not only because the Marxist mode of thought feels a bit worn-out and because Le Guin is basically on my side, but also because it’s barbaric to condemn this or any other work of literature for its lack of political correctness (in the old Soviet sense). One shouldn’t expect to have one’s politics confirmed by every work of literature.
Conclusion
Politics aside, what stays with me most is not the moral outrage, but the picture of a different way of life, one without domination and hierarchy. Even if Le Guin finally retreats into liberalism, that alternative human lifeworld remains in the mind as a horizon of hopeful imagination.