Author Archives: R Cawkwell

Winner of the 1973 Hugo award for Best Novella, and nominated for many others, The Word for World is Forest is part of Le Guin’s ‘Hainish Cycle’. It explores a future history of Earth and pacifistic ideals in its depictions of violence, colonialism and resistance.

A world of peaceful aliens conquered by bloodthirsty yumens, their existence is irrevocably altered. Forced into servitude, the Athsheans find themselves at the mercy of their brutal masters.

Desperation causes the Athsheans to retaliate against their captors, abandoning their strictures against violence. In defending their lives, they endanger the very foundations of their society. Every blow against the invaders is a blow to the core of Athsheans’ culture.

And once the killing starts, there is no turning back.

My Review

This novella has been on my TBR pile for a while; my sleep pattern has been messed up by doing too much last week, so I slept most of yesterday, and as such I was awake half the night. Since I needed to keep myself entertained, I picked a book off my TBR pile. I read all 113 pages in one go, after reading the 2022 introduction by the series editor, and the author’s 1976 introduction. I found them both helpful in my reading of the novella, to understand the context. When LeGuin wrote this story, the U.S. was fighting an unjust war in Vietnam. She admits to being preachy in writing the story and not being subtle about her anger. LeGuin writes in her 1976 introduction that she tried to make the characters complex, except Davidson, who is a caricature of the evil invader. I think it’s important to remember the context and author’s own thoughts about the work when reading it.

This novella is part of the Hainish series. The context of the Hainish universe, with multiple humanoid species in the wider story-universe. The humans are part of a League with these other civilisations, but on the planet, Athshe, they are 27 light years from Earth and have only old orders to follow. On the planet, there is a humanoid species, the Athsheans, who are smaller, and furred. The Athsheans have a complex society and live partly in world-time and dream-time, with a multiphasic sleep pattern.

The humans are soldiers and loggers. They’re destroying the forest, which kills the land, as the continuous rain washes the soil away without the tree roots to hold it in place. After one of the soldiers, Davidson, rapes and murders one of the Athsheans, he’s attacked by her husband. Later, the husband leads an attack on the logging camp that Davidson runs, killing all of the humans and freeing the Athsheans. This man becomes a god among the Athsheans, the first to commit murder.

What follows is a war as the Athsheans demand promises from the humans that they’ll free the Athshean slaves, stay in their already deforested area, and stop destroying the forest. Davidson, a paranoid soldier, continues his war on the Athsheans, resulting in retaliatory attacks on the main human settlement and one of the logging camps.

It’s a short, punchy story, told from the perspective of multiple characters in eight chapters. I found it thought-provoking and painful to read at times. It’s probably not the book you should start with when reading LeGuin. You need more of the context of the Hainish series.