the word for world is forest by ursula k le guin

No matter how good Lang was as Quaritch, the script meant that the colonel was part of the system, and hence in the movie, the Pandorans had to reject the entire system. The difference comes in how Le Guin lets you watch Davidson's disintegration from the inside, from what seems like a stereotypical jarhead into a paranoid psychotic, so that even the hateful (and hateable!) Davidson is fully human after all. Both are ruthless in their dealings with the locals and the new world, and both believe that it's suicide not to treat the new world ruthlessly. If you think of Avatar, then the movie's Colonel Quaritch (played so well by Stephen Lang) isn't a bad fit for the novel's antagonist, Capt. Now that they've consciously breached their absolute nonviolence, what then for the Athsheans? And what then for the humans, both those in the novel and those reading it? Previously, the Athsheans had been understood as systemically incapable of violence against another person.

The absolute disrespect shown by humans for Athshe's ecosystems, animals and humanoids leads to warfare, sparked by an individual conflict between a single human and a single Athshean. Technologically advanced humans from Earth have begun enslaving the Athsheans in order to consume and change, entirely, the planet's natural resources. (Sorry, gang!)īasic plot: It's the future, humans are one humanoid race among several, and humans have colonial rights on Athshe, or World 41, which is about 27 years travel from Earth. For Le Guin and The Word for World Is Forest, though, it seems I've made an exception, and my students are just going to have to be okay with that. And for a teacher as hopeless as I am at keeping up with my reading, even when I'm at leisure, the first weeks of September are NOT the time that I tend to read compulsively for fun. I was grabbed immediately by this novel, firmly, and I finished it the evening of the day I bought it. I mean, come on - Kubrick accepts anachronism in Full Metal Jacket just so a copy of the novel can be on a bedside table five years before its actual publication date?īut no way am I pushing back.

And sure, it's been respected for long enough that maybe it's time to push back against this novel. Sure, as other reviewers will tell you, the novel's setup and conceptual framework were deeply mined for Avatar. At 180 pages of text, in many ways it's like a haiku, an aphorism, an epigraph: you know what's there without her having to tell you about it.

Le Guin's early-70s novel The Word for World Is Forest, but it's shocking how much she's jammed into it. It's a slim and seemingly light volume, Ursula K.

The word for world is forest by ursula k le guin