The Word for World is Forest – Ursula K. Le Guin
It starts off sounding just like a regular SF potboiler. Captain Davidson is a space frontiersman twenty-seven light years from home and battling hard to extract raw material to send back to Earth. It’s wood that the planet he’s on has to offer, so he’s cutting down trees and getting them sawn up for lumber as efficiently as he can. It’s a tough job but he’s willing to give it all he’s got. It doesn’t help that cleared forest turns to mud in the rain and their crops are lost in the erosion. They’re short on manpower and all he has a for a factotum is a dumb, slow-moving “creechie,” which is quickly forgotten as Davidson turns his mind to the arrival of a shipload of women—prime breeding stock—and dissension from the scientific team about his methods.
The reader, then, doesn’t pay much heed to the native “creechie”, either. And here is the first instance of Le Guin’s skill. We have taken on board the genre-specific mentality of space-conquering mankind, its superior intellect and physicality, and Davidson’s view of the indigenous species as ignorant and inept.
That we come to revise this misconception as the narrative progresses, and go on to fully realize the subtlety and depth of the native Athsheans’ culture and psyche, reflects as well as any story I have read a reassessment and correction of the prevailing view of dominant white western man of the black people that they made slaves, and of the indigenous populations that they robbed and exterminated.
Le Guin deliberately makes the Athsheans small, furry beings that our prejudiced homo-sapiens-centric mindset might look down on and consider as lesser-evolved. They will turn out to have a civilization as complex as the forest itself, in and with which they live in tune. In doing so, she presents this race on another planet as people, but not as a version of humans that we might compare and find wanting. Their ethics are as true as any people’s, but their communities work in different ways and they have an interesting, dual, conscious experience of reality that moves between a waking dream state and world time: what we know as normal awareness.
Le Guin doesn’t make the mistake of idolizing the Athsheans, which would only be the reverse of the coin of prejudice, but treats them with more respect than that. Introduced to violence, under Selver they appropriate it and pay the “yumens” back.
If Davidson’s exploitative, might-is-right mentality points to the fear of the unknown that terrorizes the uneducated, ignorant mind and makes him despise beings that he sees as mere brutes, this same fear is evinced when confronted with minds, again from another race, that operate on yet another plane, but this time his superiors’ superiors. He treats the representatives from the League of Worlds (forerunner of Le Guin’s Ekumen) with what amounts to the same suspicion and hatred.
Fear of the other, which includes war on the natural, living home of which we are part, inseparable and interconnected: as always, the interesting science fiction is about the here and now. It also, with the development of the League of Worlds, for example, bears hope for a more enlightened future.
As I reread The Word of for World is Forest, Selver’s character brought strongly to my mind the figure of Ishi, last of the Yahi tribe, who, alone and starving, emerged from his native territory in California in 1911 expecting to be killed by the white man. He was eventually befriended by Le Guin’s father, the anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber, studied and looked after, but never again at home. When he was close to death, Ishi was brought “home” to a sunny room in Kroeber’s museum with a view of eucalyptus trees. It doesn’t take much imagination to know how much the man would have wished to die in the true, natural home of his ancestral lands.
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) I started Nightside the Long Sun - the first book in the epic, 4-volume Long Sun saga by Gene Wolfe. Now OK, I probably wasn't the full shilling at 01.00 but so far I'm finding it surreal, to say the least! So many characters, all of them strange, all of them just sketched. I'm hoping bits of back story will be told and the world they're embedded in will start to take shape. All we know is that it's very old - old enough to be a bit broken and decrepit but still basically liveable. Might report back when I've found my feet!
