The Word for World is Forest
The Word for World is Forest is a quick little story that reminded me of nothing so much as Avatar. That comparison feels a bit unfair to LeGuin. After all, Avatar was a movie with a mostly forgettable plot and characters that achieved huge success mostly because it looked cool (and because it tricked us all into shelling out for the more expensive 3D tickets). LeGuin's novella does a whole lot more than look cool. But the bones of the plot are the same.
Humanity has discovered a planet with a valuable resource (wood, in this case, which Earth has run out of) and has determined to take it all for themselves, ignoring the local life who are seen as so primitive that our only choice is to either exterminate them or force them into slave labor.The book switches between three points of view: Captain Davidson is heading up one of the logging camps, and he provides the most heinous voice as he keeps finding new ways to justify the atrocities he commits. Raj Lyubov is an anthropologist who has gone the farthest in trying to understand the native Athsheans, but his protests about their treatment fall on deaf ears. And Selver provides us with the Athshean perspective as he leads an uprising against the human colonizers.
This is book about the damage we do in the name of profit. It's about our willful blindness to the humanity of others. And it's about the ways evil changes us, even if we defeat it. You can't unlearn something once it stops being useful and becomes dangerous. All you can do is move forward and try to limit the damage. It's also about linguistics and the ways culture and language shape each other.
Overall, I enjoyed this book immensely. I think my comparison to Avatar is unfair because LeGuin does so much more with the plot and characters than that book did. It strikes a chord and gets you thinking about things, as good science-fiction should, rather than being a shiny container with no real substance. LeGuin doesn't just rely on the tropes to tell the story for her, she uses them to explore questions she's interested in.
Humanity has discovered a planet with a valuable resource (wood, in this case, which Earth has run out of) and has determined to take it all for themselves, ignoring the local life who are seen as so primitive that our only choice is to either exterminate them or force them into slave labor.The book switches between three points of view: Captain Davidson is heading up one of the logging camps, and he provides the most heinous voice as he keeps finding new ways to justify the atrocities he commits. Raj Lyubov is an anthropologist who has gone the farthest in trying to understand the native Athsheans, but his protests about their treatment fall on deaf ears. And Selver provides us with the Athshean perspective as he leads an uprising against the human colonizers.
This is book about the damage we do in the name of profit. It's about our willful blindness to the humanity of others. And it's about the ways evil changes us, even if we defeat it. You can't unlearn something once it stops being useful and becomes dangerous. All you can do is move forward and try to limit the damage. It's also about linguistics and the ways culture and language shape each other.
Overall, I enjoyed this book immensely. I think my comparison to Avatar is unfair because LeGuin does so much more with the plot and characters than that book did. It strikes a chord and gets you thinking about things, as good science-fiction should, rather than being a shiny container with no real substance. LeGuin doesn't just rely on the tropes to tell the story for her, she uses them to explore questions she's interested in.
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