“The Word for World is Forest” is a science-fiction novella by Ursula Le Guin. It was written during the Vietnam War, and clearly shows the author’s views of that situation, and the harm it was doing, to the natives and the invaders alike. This story discussed colonialism, the environment, imperialism, racism. It holds up a mirror to all of this that was going on and, over fifty years later, continues to happen. The setting may be science-fiction, but it shows us ourselves.

The world is called Athshe, and its inhabitants are short and furry. The humans arrive and take over easily, as violence is unknown to the Athsheans. They enslave many of the natives and start cutting down the trees, to be shipped away to Earth which has destroyed its own forests. It does not occur to the humans to treat the Athsheans well. They don’t look like humans so it is convenient to believe they are less than human, the age-old justification for subjugation and murder. However, the Athsheans prove that they are capable of learning, even something as alien to them as violence.

Davidson can be easily written off as a cliché, as he is a poster boy for all the nasty attitudes and behaviours you can think of. He is racist, xenophobic, misogynist, homophobic, and generally bigoted. He believes any man who is educated must be gay. He believes hating the natives makes him somehow patriotic. He considers women to be mere objects. He  might easily be dismissed as one-dimensional, but when you look at the history of colonialism he is, sadly, not unusual. Even current events will show us that many people are quite comfortable with these kinds of attitudes. Davidson is a believer in the nineteenth century idea of manifest destiny, that white people were destined to take over.

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.

As the story develops it is clear that Davidson is not exactly a stable person. He is paranoid, a torturer, rapist and murderer. He enjoys the idea of wiping out all of the natives. If something goes wrong, he assumes that others are plotting against him, though he sees nothing wrong in betraying his comrades for what he is convinced is right. Anyone who disagrees with him is labelled a coward and a traitor. The messages through the new communication system are seen as fake, because they don’t agree with Davidson’s mindset. He decides that the people who survived the native attack on the main colony must be traitors because most of them are Asian.

You couldn’t be fully human without some blood in your veins from the cradle of man.

He attacks the Athshean warrens in his area and because they don’t immediately respond he pats himself on the back and believes they are too scared. When the attack comes he still thinks they can win with the bombs they have on board, and attacks the two men with him when they refuse to bomb an area where some of their people might be alive. To Davidson this is treason and being captured makes you worthless.

Sooner or later they all joined up against him, because they just couldn’t take it the way he could … it just happened to be the way things are.  

He is clearly insane by the end of the story, as Selver himself explains. Through Davidson’s elaborate justifications we can see how the attacker dehumanises himself.

Lyubov is an anthropologist, on Athshe to study the natives. He has determined that they are incapable of killing, each other or the humans. It is simply not in their world view. But he knows they are not incapable of personal violence, and younger ones can wrestle and fist fight. It just doesn’t end in killing. Lyubov witnesses the attack by Selver on Davidson immediately after Selver’s wife died as a result of being raped by Davidson. He saves Lyubov from being killed by Davidson, teaches him the language, and learns a great deal of Athshean culture and society from Selver. But in this act he alienates himself from the rest of the colonisers, and earns hatred from Davidson, who seems outraged about what was ultimately minor injury from a native he’d nearly killed. Another scientist asks him why he did it and likens his act to rescuing a rat from an experiment. This person also trots out the line of ‘human nature’.

Selver warns Lyubov of the attack on Central, telling him to leave. Lyubov doesn’t leave, but doesn’t tell anyone what he knows. It is only when the attack begins that he realises:

He was the only man in Centralville not taken by surprise. In that moment he knew what he was: a traitor.

Lyubov is an interesting character and an integral part of the point Le Guin is making. In Lyubov we see that passive minor objections do nothing. Lyubov is well-intentioned, but powerless. He comes to see that his work is enabling the system.

Selver the Athshean is the one who learns the lesson of murder from the humans, Davidson particularly. Davidson rapes Selver’s wife, and she dies shortly after. It is this pivotal moment that gives Selver the anger to attack Davidson and try to kill him. Davidson would have killed Selver without Lyubov’s intervention, but the lesson has been learned.

LeGuin’s ability to world build and create truly alien mindsets is exceptional. For the Athsheans she has drawn in part on the dreaming traditions of indigenous peoples such as the Australian aboriginals. The Athsheans take their dreams seriously, and the dreamers are listened to when they speak about what they have dreamed. The Athsheans listen to Selver and call him a god, by which they seem to mean someone who excels at a particular skill, and in this case a brand new skill that they have not previously conceived, murder.

… a god that knows death, a god that kills and is not himself reborn.

The son of forest-fire, the brother of the murdered. He is the one who is not reborn.

Selver has come to understand that their whole world will be destroyed as the invaders cut down trees, because the forest is the world (hence the title). Selver teaches his people how to kill, and they fight back against the invaders. It is easier than it should have been as the invaders cannot conceive that creatures they have decided are not human can win the battle. Though Selver has led the resistance, he understands more than most others that what has happened changes his own people completely.

What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.

Selver’s bleak prediction concludes the story.

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.

“The Word for World is Forest” is a gripping account about just how much invasion, war, colonisation, subjugation of others, can destroy everything. It destroys the invaders, it destroys the invaded. It destroys homes and cultures and psyches. That kind of destruction is so all-encompassing that it seems only rational to stop doing it. But we will not admit to the destruction, instead telling ourselves comfortable lies about how necessary it all is and how it will all be for the best. It is telling how often throughout the story each side comments on how insane the others appear. Le Guin shows how much people rationalise any wrong-doing, excusing themselves and casting themselves as heroes of their own stories. I feel we are very rarely heroes. When he saves Selver, Lyobov comes to a conclusion that sums up the entire theme of the story:

For it’s all the rest of us who are killed by the suicide, it’s himself who the murderer kills; only he has to do it over, and over, and over.