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Jump to navigationJump to searchThe Word for World is Forest by Ursula K Le Guin (view source)
Revision as of 10:46, 1 April 2015
, 10:46, 1 April 2015no edit summary
|title=The Word for World is Forest
|sort=Word for World is Forest, The
|author=Ursula K le Le Guin
|reviewer=John Lloyd
|genre=Science Fiction
|summary=A sci-fi classic that is unfortunately clunky and dated, but still interesting.
}}
There probably is an [[:Category:Ursula K le Le Guin|Ursula K le Le Guin]] book for everyone. For fans of consummate, ageless fantasy, there are the first few Earthsea books, that I met as a child and still hold in high esteem. For the feminist reader, there are much more recent novels that I would even baulk at putting on a genre shelf, so light are the sci-fi or fantastical trappings. But there are also classics of the former genre, too – hard sci-fi written at one of the past peaks of the form, and deemed timeless, as this current reprint suggests. These are sci-fi works that mean something – that shine a light on then-current thinking, or then-recent history or actions, but that are still designed to appeal to the hard-core genre fan. The example of ''The Word for World is Forest'' is one such, with an obvious nod to the Vietnam situation. It's a shame then that for me, at the remove of 2015, it doesn't tick many more boxes, all told.
In an incredibly thinly-disguised attack, Ms le Guin portrays the American gung-ho militaristic mindset as it attacked Vietnam, and grounds it in a devil-may-care, fire-bombing, resource-ignoring, racist bigot. He's not attacking Vietnam, however – no, his station is a planet far removed from a very far-future Earth, which desperately needs as many shipments of extra-terrestrial wood as it can get, seeing as it itself is a dying place. Never mind the fact that all the natives, who have an intimate form of secondary, dreamlike existence, and a matriarchal society (of course), desperately rely on the woodlands that have remained virgin for millennia. They're just in the way, and with our human machinery and carpet-bombing possibilities, they're surely not going to break out of their slave-like existence and cause any trouble – are they?
