The Word for World is Forest

Le Guin sagt selbst im Vorwort, dass es mehr eine moralische Geschichte ist mit einer klaren Teilung in Gut und Böse. Der Titel verspricht etwas mehr Spiritualität als im Buch selber ist. Es ist eine typische Konflikstory: Technologie vs. Natur, Herrschaft vs. Kooperation, Zukunftsglauben/Progress vs. Traditionalistische soziale Systeme usw. Der Stil ist wieder hervorragend. Mein größtes Manko, dass der Titel mehr verspricht als der Text. Ich hätte viel stärker den Wald als Akteur auftreten erwartet.

"Das Wort für Welt ist Wald" gehört zu den Büchern, von denen ich mir wünsche, dass sie irgendwann nicht mehr aktuell sind. Dauert wohl noch.

"Die Überlieferung" erinnert mich entfernt an "Kondorkinder" (Sabrina Železný), mit weniger Abenteuer und mehr Innenleben.

The novella makes an odd counterpoint to Little Fuzzy: In this case the humans recognized the natives' sapience right away -- barely -- but decide to enslave them and clear-cut their world anyway.

It bounces between several viewpoints: one of the natives who has escaped from slavery, a sympathetic human scientist...and the villain, a gung-ho military type who thinks he's the best of humanity, but shows himself to be among the worst.

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.

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.

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 Athsheans' 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.

Cross-posted from my website, where I go into a bit more detail on the Terrans' dehumanization of the Athsheans, and current events.

it's a fairly short and straightforward story about resistance to colonization, but embedded in it is a kind of complicated discussion about the legitimacy of violence. It seems like it was in part a commentary on the Vietnam War (which is even alluded to at one point).

Don Davidson is one of the more thoroughly unpleasant viewpoint characters I've read; fortunately he is meant to be villainous, & at any rate it's only from his point of view for about a third of the book. His motivation, worldview & actions are disturbing but accurate for a certain sort of man.