The Word for World Is Forest [Paperback]

Superb! This short novel is on one level a critique of American tactics and prejudice during the Vietnam War (coming to its end as the book was written) and also a study of how different humans can be and how hard it is to understand one another, a study of how so-called 'primitive' people have levels of wisdom that show the insanity of Western technological-man destroying his environment in the name of progress. I am sure that James Cameron must have been aware of this book prior to making 'Avatar'. It's a shame he did not utilise more of the book's subtlety in his film. As an Ursula Le Guin novel the writing is impeccable as ever.

"Many words of the Women's Tongue, the everyday speech of the Athsheans, came from the Men's Tongue that was the same in all communities, and these words often were not only two-syllabled but two-sided. They were coins, obverse and reverse...Often [the two meanings] were connected, yet not so often as to constitute a rule."

- anthropologist Raj Lyubov, herein

Athshe is a world of ocean and islands, whose land-dwelling lifeforms were obviously imported from Earth about a million years ago. Similar enough to be recognizable - and to trip up Earth-humans attempting to understand the people of Athshe who fail to take into account the subtle differences. The land-based portion of the ecosystem is small, but stable - forests that keep the topsoil from washing away, a small population packed relatively close together, with a culture that channels their aggression into (mostly) non-violent outlets. In particular, while they're in an environment unsuitable for some kinds of development, they've mastered the arts of controlling their dreams. Their language is a particularly interesting key in understanding their culture.

Then the humans of Earth arrived, determined to exploit the planet for its resources and colonize it, faced with a native population without a tradition of warfare or advanced weaponry with which to fight - a population which those in charge aren't interested in understanding, but who aren't fools, and who are being *shown* how to make war in a series of pitiless, unending lessons.

In an interesting twist, two of the three viewpoint characters are Earth-humans, representing opposing points of view on Athshe's true worth and the worth of its people, while the third is a Dreamer of Athshe. Davidson, who fancies himself as a pioneer and Conquistador, opens the book with his bigoted view of the native "creechies" - only to find himself flat on his back, at the mercy of a man whose wife he killed, left alive to carry a message back to the other humans. Lyubov, the planet's only anthropologist and the only human to have properly studied the languages of its people, provides a window through which the reader can gain a clearer understanding of Athshe's culture. Finally, Selver, Lyubov's friend and Davidson's victim, has become a god among his people, though what that means isn't quite what an Earth human might think; and having learned what will happen if the humans are left unresisted, he has also absorbed their lessons of warfare. The contrast between Davidson's view of Athshe - rotting forests to be cleared away, animals to hunt - and that of Selver's people is in itself worth reading the book for. (In fact, the nuances of Athshe culture that lead them to practice warfare, and the accompanying nuances of understanding their language and their mastery of dreams are as important, if not more so, than the brewing revolt.)

Less than three thousand aggressive, armed Earth people - only a few hundred of them women, incidentally - against a native population of about three million, wherein the Earth people are cut off from the rest of interstellar civilization by the barrier of lightspeed. The lack of supply lines is a serious handicap to the better-equipped Earth-people, but numbers and familiarity with the terrain are on the side of those born on Athshe.

As one outsider points out, "You have not thought things through." The ecological disaster shaping up on Athshe is quite logical in its development - the loggers are following profitable plans of exploitation drawn up on Earth, where the communications lag prevented sensible feedback from being applied when the native ecology was better understood, and naturally enough, military and management personnel are in charge on "New Tahiti", not ecologists, and they don't *want* to believe that logging out the islands will turn them into desert rather than farmland. The slow build-up of native resistance is due to most of Athshe's people not having even seen the new invaders, while few of those who *have* suffered from them are in a position to make their people see the danger, being enslaved under conditions that for an Athshean interfere with the ability to think clearly, since Earth-human and Athshean sleeping patterns differ as much as their cultures do.