Le Guin wrote this novella during the US invasion of Vietnam, and the book’s laser focus on the issues raised by that conflict means it has aged less richly than The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, or The Lathe of Heaven.
This story tells the tale of a colonial expedition: a crew of a few hundred men travel to a distant planet and extract its natural resources. To do so, they enslave the indigenous population, who they treat as animals, even while they rape them. The indigenous people — Athsheans — rise up and destroy one of the settlements. In the civilization’s core, instantaneous interplanetary communication is invented and brought to the planet, radically changing the relationship between the colonial outpost and the governing interplanetary League. A settler anthropologist, Lyubov, stands in for the US anti-war movement. He alone recognizes the humanity of the Athsheans, and advocates for their liberation.
In a surprisingly Hegelian turn, the State reigns in the colonizers and negotiates a permanent withdrawal from the planet, promising to return only in five generations’ time and even then only a handful of visitors for scientific expeditions. (Hegel viewed the Sovereign as a limit on the ability of the aristocracy to exploit the masses.) It is interesting to see Le Guin’s optimism in the role of the state to impose justice, since she is usually identified as an anarchist and her fictional works are quite critical of centralized authority (see, for example, The Dispossessed, The Lathe of Heaven). Still, an Athshean character, Selver, questions how capable the League really is of enforcing its ban on interfering with the planet, whose future is left open-ended:
“You decide matters all at once, your people,” [Selver] said, again between statement and question.
“How do you mean?” The Commander looked wary.
“Well, you say that none of you shall cut the trees of Athshe: and all of you stop. And yet you live in many places. Now if a headwoman in Karach gave an order, it would not be obeyed by the people of the next village, and surely not by all the people in the world at once…”
“No, because you haven’t one government over all. But we do—now—and I assure you its orders are obeyed. By all of us at once. But, as a matter of fact, it seems to me from the story we’ve been told by the colonists here, that when you gave an order, Selver, it was obeyed by everybody on every island here at once. How did you manage that?”
“At that time I was a god,” Selver said, expressionless.
Le Guin’s Athsheans are a mishmash of idealized indigenous stereotypes. They live in harmony with nature in peaceful, egalitarian communities. Their women are political leaders and their men are spiritual leaders. Dreams are culturally and spiritually significant, and can be consciously directed to communicate with others. They lack the concept of murder until the settlers arrive in their lush garden — an event that is an allegory for colonialism’s impact on the societies it collided with as well as an allusion to biblical Original Sin. Although the colonizers leave, this knowledge of murder and violence is something the Athsheans are permanently left to grapple with. “You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity,” Selver answers in response to a League representative asking if the Ashtheans have returned to their pre-colonial ways.
The story is fine, but a little overly simple. Le Guin’s other works challenge us to confront dearly-held or deeply-rooted beliefs. The Lathe of Heaven asks us if gender is really real and fixed, or socially constructed and fluid. The Dispossessed questions if liberalism and anarchism are really as free and fair as their proponents argue. The Lathe of Heaven examines the ramifications of trying to impose one’s vision of a better world on others. These are still pertinent, fiercely-debated political questions. In contrast, The Word for World is Forest questions colonial exploitation, a matter that seems well settled now, if it was not already settled for most people by the 1970s, following decades of national liberation movements. If her narrative had been more subtle — its colonial representative are near caricatures of racism and misogyny — it may have been better able to challenge any lingering settler ideology in the typical Le Guin reader. On the other hand, that may have made it a less pointed critique at its time of publication.
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