The Word for World is Forest is infuriating to read…and that’s the point.
It makes an odd counterpoint to Little Fuzzy: In this case the humans from Earth recognized the natives’ sapience right away – barely – but decide to enslave them and clear-cut their world anyway.
The novella bounces between several viewpoints: one of the native Athsheans who has escaped from slavery, a sympathetic Terran scientist…and the villain, a gung-ho military type who’s also racist, misogynistic, totally on board with the enslavement, backstabbing, double-dealing, always jumps straight to violence first, has a terrible case of tunnel vision but thinks he knows better than everyone, and anyone who disagrees with him mush be insufficiently masculine, etc. Of course the natives can’t be fully human because they don’t even have villages, never mind cities (they do, he’s just not looking for them), and they’re so lazy (no, they have a different sleep cycle than Terrans, and a dual waking/dreaming consciousness), they’re barely even good enough for slave labor…And they’re wimpy pacifists to boot, they won’t even stand up for themselves (they have other ways of resolving conflicts than just hitting each other, but they don’t work against aliens who don’t understand their signals)…
I mean, it really lays it on thick.
And of course he thinks he represents the best of humanity.
In the 90s, conservatives would have complained about him being a straw man caricature. These days, they’d celebrate him as a pundit or run him for office.
What starts as a single raid to free slaves and retaliate for murder turns into an extended guerrilla conflict. It’s a tragedy, a train wreck, a slow-moving avalanche, and yet every time there’s a chance to pause and maybe resolve the situation, Davidson chooses to escalate things instead. Even when the higher-ups tell him not to, he convinces other soldiers to go rogue along with him.
Meanwhile, Selver and the Athsheans start losing themselves in the new experience of war. Even if they succeed, they’ll be changed forever.
Still Going On
While it’s directly a response to America’s actions in the Vietnam War, the themes of colonial exploitation, dehumanization, psyops, asymmetrical warfare and environmental degradation are still very topical. Pebble Mine. The Dakota Access Pipeline. Running freeways through disadvantaged neighborhoods. Conflict palm oil. Ongoing deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. Those are just off the top of my head, and not even getting into outright military conflicts.
I don’t know whether to be angry or sad that we’re still dealing with the same issues 50 years later.
It’s not nuanced. It won’t make you think about new ideas like The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, or The Lathe of Heaven. (The dream state is interesting, but not explored deeply and not the point of the story.) But it will make you angrier at the people who are still doing the exploiting.
Regarding the Title
It’s a contrast to the way we Terrans from Earth with places like England use words relating to dirt to refer to the place we live. (Even the Principality of Sealand, an offshore platform miles from the coast and claiming to be a sovereign state, has “land” in its name.) The Athsheans’ focus on forests and tree ecosystems instead of land provides a different perspective.
