The Word for World Is Forest

September 6, 2020 2:04 PM

The Word for World Is Forest: Ecology, Colonialism, and the Protest Movement A biweekly series, The Ursula K. Le Guin Reread explores anew the transformative writing, exciting worlds, and radical stories that changed countless lives. This week we’ll be covering the novella The Word for World Is Forest, first published in Harlan Ellison, ed., Again, Dangerous Visions (1972).
posted by infini (6 comments total)

Thank you. This was a big deal for me growing up, and it, together with The Left Hand of Darkness and a few other less enlightened books, make up a large part of my general ethos.
posted by signal at 4:50 PM on September 6, 2020 [3 favorites]

This story had a profound influence on me that I'm just now recollecting. Thanks so much for sharing it.
posted by aspersioncast at 4:54 PM on September 6, 2020 [2 favorites]

I went back to the beginning of this reread series for a leisurely afternoon of nostalgia-for-books-I-have-read, which is a nice treat after cleaning out a garden shed that might as well be a superfund site.
posted by janell at 6:35 PM on September 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

Ah, how exciting! My household spent a wonderful several months in our mini book club, overthinking each chapter of The Dispossessed, and as soon as we finished it seemed like we had only just begun appreciating its full depth. This whole reread series is going to be a huge treat!
posted by Pwoink at 6:48 PM on September 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

I read The Word for World Is Forest as a young teen and it really changed me. I wouldn’t have been able to articulate properly at the time, but I began to understand, dimly, something about how violence worked on a global level.

It also made me into an ardent feminist. The ending, where the human women brought to Athshe are slaughtered, is so bleak, and such a slap in the face of the reader who’s been pulled into rooting wholeheartedly for the Athsheans, that it shocked me into comprehension.

I didn’t have the vocabulary for it, but I understood the lesson, sexism cuts across everything, so that even among the otherwise righteous, misogyny is there.
posted by Kattullus at 12:29 AM on September 7, 2020

I read this in my 20s (which were in the first post-Vietnam years), and it made a deeper impression than any of her longer, better known works. I always wondered why it wasn't discussed as much as the others. Whenever the intersectionality of imperialism, feminism, and environmentalism came up (as when I recalled a college biology prof spending a whole class on a slide show of the work he had done with other scientists documenting the damage to the Vietnamese forest ecology by Agent Orange (which defoliated "an area the size of Massachusetts")), I thought of the title of the novella and all that transpired therein.
posted by Philofacts at 2:17 AM on September 7, 2020 [1 favorite]