Book Report: The Word for World Is Forest

5. Ursula Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest (1972) (2/24/22)

I finished this book a week ago now, and I've dragged my feet on logging a report. I think, mainly, because it's such a sad, sad book. Which has weighed on me.

It's a story of colonizers and oppressors (yumans), trying to take over a world of peaceful beings (the Athsheans, aka "creechies"—three-foot-tall fur-covered people with deep deep eyes) in order to mine their resources—in this case, trees, since the yumans have denuded their own home planet of Terra of anything resembling lumber—and to prepare the logged areas for future agriculturalist settlers. 

Sound familiar? Well, maybe except for the furry people. Though in Le Guin's world, these beings all evolved from the same pregenitor. 

Again: sound familiar?

I have been curious about Le Guin, and have read a few of her many, many books (including, recently, this one). Not too long ago I ran into someone's list of favorite books by Le Guin. The Word for World was number 1. I bit. 

(I just now googled such lists and came up with a few. The Word  is on some of them, but not all. Obviously, Le Guin, in her richness, means different things to different people. Here are a few of those lists: 1, 2, 3, 4.)

Anyway, this one. It involves an awful opportunist (yuman, of course), a not awful anthropologist (also yuman: so we get the extremes on the scale), and Selver, an Athshean (for a while, an Athshean god), who does the unthinkable—murders—in order to save his home. 

This book is #5 in Le Guin's Hainish Cycle, so it's part of an entire ecosystem. Apparently the books can stand alone, and no, I didn't feel at a disadvantage for not having read #s 1–4. But now I'm curious about them too.

From this book and the one I read not too long ago, I sense a great depth of thought and feeling, and of the notions of truth and justice, in Le Guin's approach to her imaginary worlds. These places are rife with conflict, but balance is achievable—though, at least in this case, at a serious cost. 

Here is a passage I flagged:

Like most Terrans on Terra, Lyubov [the anthropologist] had never walked among wild trees at all, never seen a wood larger than a city block. At first on Athshe he had felt oppressed and uneasy in the forest, stifled by its endless crowd and incoherence of trunks, branches, leaves in the perpetual greenish or brownish twilight. The mass and jumble of various competitive lives all pushing and swelling outward and upward toward light, the silence made up of many little meaningless noises, the total vegetable indifference to the presence of mind, all this had troubled him, and like the others he had kept to clearings and to the beach. But little by little he had begun to like it . . . and now after four years . . . he was completely at home under the trees, more so perhaps than anywhere else.
     He had also come to like the Athsheans' names for their own lands and places, sonorous two-syllabled words: Sornol, Tuntar, Eshreth, Eshsen—that was now Centralville—Endtor, Abtan, and above all Athshe, which meant the Forest, and the World. So Earth, Terra, meant both the soil and the planet, two meanings and one. But to the Athsheans soil, ground, earth was not that to which the dead return and by which the living live: the substance of their world was not earth, but forest. Terran man was clay, red dust. Athshean man was branch and root. They did not carve figures of themselves in stone, only in wood.