Changes

|title=The Word for World is Forest

|sort=Word for World is Forest, The

|publisher=Gollancz

|date=March 2015

|website=http://www.ursulakleguin.com/

|summary=A sci-fi classic that is unfortunately clunky and dated, but still interesting.

}}

There probably is an [[:Category:Ursula K Le Guin|Ursula K 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.