Westfahl, Gary (20 December 2009). "All Energy Is Borrowed: A Review of Avatar". Locus Online . Retrieved 30 July 2015. Like H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy before and James Cameron’s Avatar after, Word for World pits the Bad Guy against the indigenous population as a representative of the worst aspects of human (Terran) life: a god-hero complex driven by greed, racism, and self-assured superiority over all life. The Davidson figure (Kellog in Piper, Quaritch in Cameron’s film) is juxtaposed by Lyubov, an anthropologist who advocates strongly for Athshe’s independence, representing a vaguely liberal they’re-human-too response to Terran expansionism. Word for World departs from the eco-capitalist fantasies of similar texts, from the idea that colonial expansion and resource extraction are OK but within reason , by presenting things from the indigenous perspective and not treating the “within reason” perspective as the final word on colonialism.

Condemnation of neutrality. It was set up that we would see that remaining neutral in the face of injustice is to side with oppression, but it didn't quite feel like that was explored fully. By the end I'm not sure this was intended at all, actually. Hard to say if this was part of the pointeLos crichis, habitantes nativos del planeta, están trabajando en calidad de "voluntarios" junto a los terrícolas, pero, como siempre, hay una discrepancia entre la palabra y las acciones, y la población nativa se ve dominada y reducida la explotación como mano de obra, y también la de su hábitat, el inmenso bosque. Lo interesante es ver con qué profundidad este hecho afecta a todos estos sujetos, ya que antes que nuestra especie los invadiera, eran pacíficos y vivían de la forma más cercana a una utopía posible; sin embargo, luego de estos cambios que se dan y las interacciones con nuestra cultura (no muy agradable), comienzan a desarrollar ciertos comportamientos violentos, entre otras cosas, que muestra que la colonización dejó una marca en la historia de aquel pueblo para siempre (he aquí la importancia de recordar la historia). White, Donna R. (1999). Dancing With Dragons: Ursula K. Le Guin and the Critics. Columbia, South Carolina: Camden house. ISBN 1-57113-034-9. The more Le Guin I read, the more I love her. Reading Le Guin for me these last couple years, reminds me of how I felt when I first discovered John le Carré. They seem to both be able to write the same theme in so many different ways. It makes me think of Monet's many versions of the same church front or pond. Masters all. An artist doesn't have to go very wide to create worlds, sometimes the best worlds are created by just going deep. Le Guin identifies herself with feminism, and is interested in non-violence and ecological awareness. She has participated in demonstrations against the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons. These sympathies can be seen in several of her works of fiction, including the Hainish universe works. [7] The novels of the Hainish universe frequently explore the effects of differing social and political systems, although she displays a preference for a "society that governs by consensus, a communal cooperation without external government." [8] Her fiction also frequently challenges accepted depictions of race and gender. [8] Primitive races always have to give way to civilized ones. Or be assimilated. But we sure as hell can't assimilate a lot of green monkeys.

Much as I'm in agreement with this book's message of environmentalism and nonviolence, I found its delivery of that message to be preachy, joyless, and heavy-handed. Its tale of colonist humans and their conflict with the native Athsheans transplants the worst atrocities of colonialism's past into the future, but loses any subtlety and nuance in the process. Sinopsis breve (porque no es tan popular): Nueva Tahití es un planeta cubierto de bosque y habitado por humanoides (seres humanos evolucionados a partir de una antigua colonización humana). El objetivo comercial de la colonia humana (yumana) es la exportación de madera, muy valiosa en la Tierra, y que pese a estar todavía en sus inicios, ya ha provocado una deforestación completa de parte de una de las grandes islas del planeta…“ All of this is Le Guin’s way of saying, perhaps, that colonialism cannot be undone—its effects linger in the heart, in the culture, in the soil and forest, in the stories a people have to tell and the songs they sing. Lyubov puts it this way: colonization brought Death out of the dream-time and into the world-time, unleashing new possibilities for violence, retaliation, and meaning-making. What is real cannot become unreal; what walks the world cannot return to dreaming. So, too, once bombs and firejelly (i.e. napalm) have been dropped, the forest and its inhabitants are never the same, and neither is the relationship between the bombed and the bomber. However, Selver and Lyubov’s communication also has demonstrable consequences for Selver and the Athsheans, no matter how necessary that communication is. For instance, Selver’s sense of self is fundamentally altered by his knowledge of human society and humans’ violence, and he’s no longer able to dream in the same way other Athsheans do. Eventually, Selver tells Lyubov that he wishes they’d never known each other, demonstrating the impact Selver’s friendship with Lyubov had on Selver’s selfhood. More broadly, Athshean society is also impacted by Selver’s connection with Lyubov. Selver’s decision to retaliate against the humans (which Lyubov’s information partly prompted) transforms the Athsheans into a violent people. Lyubov later worries that Selver has translated the worst parts of human society for his people and has learned to speak the humans’ figurative “language” of violence rather than his own. Maybe after I die people will be as they were before I was born, and before you came. But I do not think they will."In every book by Le Guin there is that special something for me, something that grabs a firm hold of my mind and heart and stubbornly hangs on, refusing to let go, burrowing deeply, growing roots, sprouting shoots that will go on to quietly, unobtrusively, almost imperceptibly change my mental landscape forever - by making me really think, by challenging established ideas, preconceptions and expectations with unexpected quiet subversive subtlety. "But even the most unmissionary soul, unless he pretend he has no emotions, is sometimes faced with a choice between commission and omission. “What are they doing?” abruptly becomes, “What are we doing?” and then, “What must I do?”Unfortunately, I wasn't alive in 1972 (it's okay, I still became a misanthropic ecologist without it). And fortunately, in the 50 years that passed between when The Word for World was published and when I read it, some of the major paradigms it challenges - views of indigenous people, ecological thinking, anthropocentrism - have shifted in ways that make this book seem less audacious. Indigenous land management techniques, for example, are having a renaissance as we realize, belatedly, that 100 years of forest fire suppression has possibly not been the way to go. It's no longer revolutionary to portray humans as the antagonists, particularly in the face of accelerating climate change. Ursula K. Le Guin published twenty-two novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many awards: Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud, etc. Her recent publications include the novel Lavinia, an essay collection, Cheek by Jowl, and The Wild Girls. She lived in Portland, Oregon. The humans in The Word for World for Forrest have already destroyed their planet’s natural world, so they look outward and attempt to colonise other worlds to harvest their natural resources (namely wood.) Again, these humans have not a thought of consequences and by extension care little for the indigenous populations of their colonies. The Word for World Is Forest is a science fiction novella by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin, first published in the United States in 1972 as a part of the anthology Again, Dangerous Visions, and published as a separate book in 1976 by Berkley Books. It is part of Le Guin's Hainish Cycle.

Cummins, Elizabeth (1990). Understanding Ursula K. Le Guin. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 0-87249-687-2. The story focuses on a military logging colony set up on the fictional planet of Athshe by people from Earth (referred to as "Terra"). The colonists have enslaved the completely non-aggressive native Athsheans, and treat them very harshly. Eventually, one of the natives, whose wife was raped and killed by a Terran military captain, leads a revolt against the Terrans, and succeeds in getting them to leave the planet. However, in the process their own peaceful culture is introduced to mass violence for the first time. And let's not forget the age-old and completely wrong paradigm of "If you're not with us, you're against us!" and the appalling idea of patriotism as hating the Other, so aptly summarized by quite caricaturish and terrifying in his self-righteous madness Davidson: "See, where we differ is that with you Earth doesn’t come first, actually. With me it does."

Le Guin's interest in Taoism influenced much of her science fiction work. Douglas Barbour stated that the fiction of the Hainish Universe contains a theme of balance between light and darkness, a central theme of Taoism. [5] She was also influenced by her early interest in mythology, and her exposure to cultural diversity as a child. Her protagonists are frequently interested in the cultures they are investigating, and are motivated to preserve them rather than conquer them. [6] Authors that influenced Le Guin include Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Italo Calvino, and Lao Tzu. [7] Coro Mena enters a dream-state to verify this information. His role as Great Dreamer is to translate what he sees in his dreams into reality, as the Athsheans live both in dream-time and world-time. The village’s women then act on his observations. Coro Mena pronounces that Selver is a god, as he now knows what death is. Selver decides to gather other Athsheans to drive the humans out of their world. Lyubov taught Selver human ways, but Selver still doesn’t know whether the “ yumens” are even men, since they kill one another. Coro Mena sends Selver off, telling him that he saw Selver in his dreams prior to Selver’s arrival, and that Selver will change their world. There is a madness to this story, a sacred insanity. As Selver comes to grips with his own divinity and the vicious dreams that he sees seeping into reality around him, he has to battle that other insane divinity, the crazy God, the protagonist-antagonist, Davidson. With the knowledge of death and murder dawning upon him, Selver counters oppression with destruction, with rebellion. And what could be more punitive than a forced exile, than a prolonged life, to a God that wants an end? So Selver bestows upon Davidson with the one thing he has never known, the one thing he abhors: mercy.

All of the books that I've read by the late Ursula Le Guin were pre-Goodreads reads (though I did reread the single fantasy novel among them, A Wizard of Earthsea, last year). This novella is the only remaining one of them that I haven't reviewed until now (though, ironically, it's also the one I'd rate the most highly in terms of literary quality). 2001 is a rough guess at when I read it (it was originally published in 1972 in Again, Dangerous Visions, the sequel to Dangerous Visions, but I've never read either of these anthologies completely). Set in the far future, like most of her SF, it fits into the broad framework of her so-called "Hainish Cycle," the premise of which I explain in my review of Planet of Exile (here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ). However, it's set much earlier, at a time when the Ekumen (though not yet called that) is in its infancy. It doesn't help that the Athsheans embody just about every romanticized stereotype of the native primitive. Like the most Disneyfied take on Native Americans, they live amongst the trees, perfectly in balance with nature. They're deeply spiritual, with a strong, aboriginal-like connection to the dream time. And, in the book's most groan-inducing conceit, they're completely peaceful, never having even conceived of murder until it's introduced to them by humans. I had trouble with this book in the beginning, mostly because the first chapter is about the hyper-masculine, misogynistic, racist, rapist, pro-pro-colonialist, protagonist-antagonist. I wondered if this was finally going to be that one Le Guin book that I would absolutely hate. But as always, she surprised me in no time. The Locus Index to SF Awards: 1973 Nebula Awards". Locus. Archived from the original on 5 June 2011 . Retrieved 6 December 2011.

The story opens with a human character, captain Davison who is an especially shameful specimen of human kind. Some might think him a cardboard villain (for how anyone can be so vile?), but I think people like him actually exist and what is worse they often have a terrible influence on others. Good people often close their eyes on what captain Davisons of this world do, letting them do their dirty work (and sadly perhaps it will be always be so, or at least as long as profit rules). While Captain Davison is enough to make you feel ashamed to be a human being and to 'root' for the aliens, there is one scientist/anthropologist Raj Lyubov, who does all he can in a terrible situation and understands the complexity and the intelligence of the native aliens. “But to the Athsheans soil, ground, earth was not that to which the dead return and by which the living live: the substance of their world was not earth, but forest.” He understands their connection to the forest and what exactly the men from Earth are destroying . “A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.” Throughout ages, we have fought to prove that we are stronger - ergo better - than whoever happens to be *Them*, scarring our history with bloodshed, hatred, exploitation, dehumanization, prejudice, murder. After all, strongest survive, as evolution postulates. Isn't that true? "You know the people you’re studying are going to get plowed under, and probably wiped out. It’s the way things are. It’s human nature, and you must know you can’t change that." Le Guin's father Alfred Louis Kroeber and mother Theodora Kroeber were scholars, and exposure to their anthropological work considerably influenced Le Guin's writing. [1] [2] Many of the protagonists of Le Guin's novels, such as The Left Hand of Darkness and Rocannon's World are also anthropologists or social investigators of some kind. [3] Le Guin uses the term Ekumen for her fictional alliance of worlds, a term which she got from her father, who derived it from the Greek Oikoumene to refer to Eurasian cultures that shared a common origin. [4]