 |
| Original cover for The Word for World is Forest (1976) by Ursula Le Guin |
This is the penultimate book in Le Guin's Hainish Cycle, a loosely affiliated series of novels about a universe where the Hainish seeded the human race throughout the galaxy before disappearing for a million years, then reestablishing contact with the colony worlds- including our Earth- called Terra in the Hainish cycle. The Word for World is Forest is the most overtly allegorical book of the Hainish Cycle. The stroy is about a Terran colony which has set up shop on a forest planet inhabited by "humans" who have widely diverged from the universal norm- they are about a meter tall and covered in green fur. They lack a word for "war" and spend have their time dreaming while awake.
The Terrans are there for the wood and they don't shy away from enslaving the natives- who they refuse to recognize as human. The attitude is at shocking variance with the philosophy expressed in the rest of the books by the pan-human alliance- a kind of Star Trek prime directive of gradual interaction and no coercion- which is brought into focus when a post-alliance space ship shows up with a brand new ansible- a device used to instantaneously between worlds. With instantaneous communication comes new orders from Terra/Earth- lay off the natives. Unfortunately, in a scenario that will be very familiar to fans of 20th century history, the natives are pissed off, and have learned about violence from their Terran captors.
Clocking in at 189 pages, The World for World is Forest is called a novella, but it's a novel- just a short novel- and the anti-colonialism message is nowhere near as controversial than it would have been fifty years ago.
Instagram