The Word for World Is Forest (Hainish Series)

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More About This Book

Overview

The award-winning masterpiece by one of today’s most honored writers!

 

The Word for World is Forest

When the inhabitants of a peaceful world are conquered by the bloodthirsty yumens, their existence is irrevocably altered. Forced into servitude, the Athsheans find themselves at the mercy of their brutal masters.

Desperation causes the Athsheans, led by Selver, to retaliate against their captors, abandoning their strictures against violence. But in defending their lives, they have endangered the very foundations of their society. For every blow against the invaders is a blow to the humanity of the Athsheans. And once the killing starts, there is no turning back.

Editorial Reviews

Jackson Tennessee Sun
"Winner of the Hugo Award....Well on its way to becoming a classic."
The Oregon Journal

“A fantasy of the future that might horridly come true; a parable from a skilled writer.”

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780765324641
  • Publisher: Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC
  • Publication date: 7/6/2010
  • Edition description: Second Edition
  • Edition number: 2
  • Pages: 192
  • Sales rank: 183,040
  • Series: Hainish Series
  • Product dimensions: 5.60 (w) x 8.62 (h) x 0.52 (d)

Meet the Author

Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin is the author of more than three dozen books for children and adults. She was awarded a Newbury Honor for the second volume of the Earthsea Cycle, The Tombs of Atuan. Among her many other distinctions are the Margaret A. Edwards Award, a National Book Award, and five Nebula Awards. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Biography

Speculative fiction, magic realism, "slipstream" fiction -- all these terms could apply to the works of Ursula K. Le Guin. Unfortunately, none was in common use when she started writing in the early 1960s. As a young writer, Le Guin weathered seven years of rejections from editors who praised her novels' elegant prose but were puzzled by their content. At a time when the only literary fiction was realistic fiction, as Le Guin later told an interviewer for The Register-Guard in Portland, Oregon, "There just wasn't a pigeonhole for what I write."

At long last, two of her stories were accepted for publication, one at a literary journal and one at a science-fiction magazine. The literary journal paid her in copies of the journal; the science-fiction magazine paid $30. She told The Register-Guard, "I thought: 'Oooohhh! They'll call what I write science fiction, will they? And they'll pay me for it? Well, here we go!' "

Le Guin continued to write and publish stories, but her breakthrough success came with the publication of The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969. The novel, which tells of a human ambassador's encounters with the gender-changing inhabitants of a distant planet, was unusual for science fiction in that it owed more to anthropology and sociology than to the hard sciences of physics or biology. The book was lauded for its intellectual and psychological depth, as well as for its fascinating premise. "What got to me was the quality of the story-telling," wrote Frank Herbert, the author of Dune. "She's taken the mythology, psychology -- the entire creative surround -- and woven it into a jewel of a story."

Since then, Le Guin has published many novels, several volumes of short stories, and numerous poems, essays, translations, and children's books. She's won an arm's-length list of awards, including both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, and a National Book Award for The Farthest Shore. Over the years, she has created and sustained two fictional universes, populating each with dozens of characters and stories. The first universe, Ekumen, more or less fits into the science-fiction mode, with its aliens and interplanetary travel; the second, Earthsea, is a fantasy world, complete with wizards and dragons. As Margaret Atwood wrote in The New York Review of Books, "Either one would have been sufficient to establish Le Guin's reputation as a mistress of its genre; both together make one suspect that the writer has the benefit of arcane drugs or creative double-jointedness or ambidexterity."

More impressive still is the way Le Guin's books have garnered such tremendous crossover appeal. Unlike many writers of science fiction, she is regularly reviewed in mainstream publications, where her work has been praised by the likes of John Updike and Harold Bloom. But then, Le Guin has never fit comfortably into a single genre. As she said in a Science Fiction Weekly interview, "I know that I'm always called 'the sci-fi writer.' Everybody wants to stick me into that one box, while I really live in several boxes. It's probably hurt the sales of my realistic books like Searoad, because it tended to get stuck into science fiction, where browsing readers that didn't read science fiction would never see it."

Le Guin has also published a translation of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, a book that has influenced her life and writing since she was a teenager; she has translated fiction by Angelica Gorodischer and a volume of poems by Gabriela Mistral; and, perhaps most gratifyingly for her fans, she has returned to the imaginary realm of Earthsea. Tehanu, which appeared in 1990, was subtitled "The Last Book of Earthsea," but Le Guin found she had more to tell, and she continued with Tales from Earthsea and The Other Wind. "I thought after 'Tehanu' the story was finished, but I was wrong," she told Salon interviewer Faith L. Justice. "I've learned never to say 'never.' "

Good To Know

The "K" in Ursula K. Le Guin stands for Le Guin's maiden name, Kroeber. Her father was the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber; her mother, the writer Theodora Kroeber, is best known for the biography Ishi in Two Worlds.

    1. Hometown:
      Portland, Oregon
    1. Date of Birth:
      October 21, 1929
    2. Place of Birth:
      Berkeley, California
    1. Education:
      B.A., Radcliffe College; M.A., Columbia University, 1952
    2. Website:
      http://www.ursulakleguin.com

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 4.5
( 10 )

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Sort by: Showing all of 10 Customer Reviews

  • Posted July 2, 2010

    more from this reviewer

    Still relevant classic

    In the far future on the pristine world of New Tahiti is a wilderness Eden that Captain Davidson and other earthlings want to exploit for profit. He has already begun cutting down the trees. If it means the primitives die so be it as collateral damage often occurs when yumans conquer Mother Nature.

    The native Athsheans are horrified over being massacred and enslaved. However, the vilest crime by the off-worlders is destroying the forest as their Word for World is Forest. Fearful of this new powerful God who is brutal on their former forest deity and on them, the Athsheans know there is little they can do but obey as violence is not in their make-up although Selver tries to lead an insurgency, which only further threatens his people's way of life.

    This book was published over thirty years ago; long before Avatar. The story line is fast-paced while using a science fiction base to make a case that the "White Man's Burden" left Africa ruined and places like Tahiti devastated. Still relevant after all these decades, readers will appreciate Ursula Le Guin's classic novella of bloodthirsty avaricious outsiders destroying a peaceful Eden for profit.

    Harriet Klausner

    3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted May 22, 2012

    sci-fi, fantasy, and anthropology

    An excellent story and writing. I cannot believe I did not discover Le Guin sooner. I highly recommend it. It's very thought-provoking and disturbing. If you like sci-fi, fantasy, and anthropology - this is for you. Also, the director of Avatar acknowledged this novella as an inspiration for the film. So if you like that then should definitely read this.

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  • Posted July 13, 2011

    Loved it

    Short and engaging. A great read that deserves multiple visits.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 12, 2005

    Well-Written Feminist Tract

    The publisher's note mentions the bloodthirsty yumens well, these military men (specifically, the lead character) aren't just bloodthirsty--they're fanatical. The allegorical connection of this story with the Vietnam War gives it power and resonance, but depicting the occupying force as slave-owners pushes the reference too far. It's one thing to question whether the reasons for going to war are justified, and quite another to suggest that we should never fight any war because the men who fight are inherently evil. Of course, we should do everything possible to eliminate war altogether LeGuin's feminist solution is to completely reorganize society along matriarchal lines (depicted in her later novel 'Always Coming Home') this radical ideology informs her depiction of the army man (in some scenes he's nearly foaming at the mouth), and, in my opinion, mars an otherwise excellent novel. The story of the natives is far more interesting than that of the occupying force. Maybe she felt the need to amp up the action, given some of the criticism she received for the mellowness of her previous books she just went too far the other way is all. Overall, I recommend this book to lovers of quality science fiction it is interesting and exciting to read.

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    Posted December 18, 2011

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