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kimsa's review against another edition
dark
emotional
hopeful
sad
4.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Slavery, Violence, Sexual harassment, and War
Moderate: Sexual assault
ka_cam's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
A heart wrenching and thought provoking read. I was impressed how she introduced complex characters, relationships, and ideologies in a short time. Deeply flawed characters navigate themes of violence, humanity/inhumanity, colonization, reality, subconscious, gender, cultural difference, self defense and more. Ultimately tragic.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror, Death, Drug use, Emotional abuse, Genocide, Hate crime, Misogyny, Physical abuse, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Slavery, Violence, Blood, Kidnapping, Grief, Murder, Colonisation, War, and Injury/Injury detail
keegan_leech's review against another edition
challenging
dark
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
I read this a couple of months ago now and I'm still thinking about it so let's get into why. Le Guin is a genius. If you just want a simple recommendation: Absolutely just go read this novella, and all her other writing while you're at it. Can't recommend her highly enough. There are certainly criticisms to be made of the novella, although its flaws don't make it less worthy of discussion or interest. The rest of this is just my thoughts on the book in more detail.
Extended Discussion
I have thought a lot about this novel in the context of two other works:
- Le Guin's essay "The Carrier-Bag Theory of Fiction", and
- James Cameron's Avatar films.
I think these make interesting (if not worthwhile, in the case of Avatar) companion pieces to the novella.
The Avatar connection is an easy one: both those films and this story are essentially sci-fi metaphors for real-world colonialism. Both revolve around far future humans who colonise a distant planet to strip it of a rare resource, which is essentially important only as a MacGuffin to drive the story. In the process, the indigenous people of the world are violently subjugated, their cultural values threatened, and eventually (minor spoiler) both fight back the incursion by humans . There's even a human sympathetic to the indigenous people who comes to understand some of their culture, and assists them in their fight. However, the two stories treat their subject matter very differently, and that comes across in the telling of the stories.
The Word for World is Forest (which I'll call Forest) focuses on the psychological and social impacts of colonisation. A central focus of the book is how the Athsheans, the story's indigenous people, are changed not just by the acts committed by the colonising humans, but by their acts of resistance. The actual fighting is almost entirely glossed over in favour of this focus on its impact. Le Guin is interested in exploring the lasting societal violence of colonisation, the damage that remains long after bodies have been buried and forests regrown.
She was thinking of the US war in Vietnam as she wrote Forest, and the parallels are clear. Some of the events in the story are clearly inspired by atrocities such as the My Lai massacre, and the environmental destruction in the novella mirrors the deliberate razing of forests by the US during that war. Even the reaction of humans on Earth who find out about events on Athshe after light-years of delay has parallels to the response to events in Vietnam from Americans an ocean away. Decades later, Le Guin's questions are still pertinent. Unexploded ordinance[1] still litters Vietnam, Cambodia, and neighbouring countries. The tonnes of napalm, agent orange, and other chemicals which the US dumped on South East Asia still have lingering impacts on the people and the environment still there. And that's to say nothing of the societal impact that lingers after the war. Even the United States is still reeling from the impact of a war it fought entirely on foreign soil.
Compare this to Avatar. Cameron seems less interested in the impacts of colonisation, and more in the cool sci-fi battles he gets to orchestrate between humans in mech suits and aliens with spears. Between the first Avatar film and its sequel, the planet of Pandora has essentially been reset to the state it was in when everything kicked off. Sure, good old American boy, and white-saviour protagonist Jake Sully is now considered a member of the indigenous Na'avi, but aside from his presence (and a few ruined mechs rusting in the forest) the Na'avi have gone back to their way of life as though the horrors of the first film were nothing more than a bad dream. The perfect backdrop for another CGI-fuelled action blockbuster!
Cameron has been (rightly) criticised online[2] for saying around the time of the first Avatar's release[3] that the Lakota Sioux may have "fought a lot harder" against their own colonisation if they could have seen their own future (in a particularly offensive aside he referred to the Lakota Sioux as "a dead-end society"). These comments (and his films) suggest that Cameron thinks the impacts of colonisation could be erased, prevented, or undone if colonised peoples had simply fought hard enough against them. Nowhere is Le Guin's acknowledgement of how even a successful anti-colonial struggle will not undo the violence that is inherent in colonisation.
It's in these differing presentations that "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" can be found. It's an essay in which Le Guin discusses storytelling, gender, and human society. The eponymous "carrier bag" is a reference to her distinction between stories of early human societies surviving by the strength of the hunter who returns with the flesh of the mammoth to feed his tribe, and the untold but much more realistic story of the carrier bag filled one at a time with foraged mushrooms. Le Guin sees the focus in fiction on heroic battles, masculine warriors, and heart-pounding excitement as an omission of the real foundations of human society, and the work which keeps societies alive. She urges storytellers to shift their focus to the carrier bag, the overlooked (often feminine) labour which underpin human societies.
In case it's unclear, Cameron seems to embody exactly the kind of storytelling that "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" opposes. He is an uncurious sensationalist, interested only in the spectacle and drama of whatever action he's able to fit onscreen. His sci-fi colonisation story is really little more than a pretty backdrop for this spectacle. Le Guin, on the other hand is interested in the personal and the social consequences of the violence she depicts. Forest is science-fiction at its best: it uses it explores the history and politics of the world it was written in by mirroring and exaggerating that world in fiction.
The novella has its flaws. I think that her treatment of her indigenous protagonists in particular is imperfect. Le Guin may not be James Cameron, whose films are almost laughable for their repetition of white saviour and noble savage tropes; she is even relatively ahead of her time as a white author writing in the 1970s. But there is a certain simplicity to the society she has created which does it a disservice. It's nothing egregious, and perhaps it's a side-effect of this being a relatively short story, but I imagine indigenous readers might find her depiction of the Athsheans too shallow. Her explorations of gender are also not as interesting as those found in, for example, The Left Hand of Darkness or her Earthsea novels. But there are aspects of ideas found in those novels and "Carrier Bag" to be seen here.
The Word for World is Forest (which I'll call Forest) focuses on the psychological and social impacts of colonisation. A central focus of the book is how the Athsheans, the story's indigenous people, are changed not just by the acts committed by the colonising humans, but by their acts of resistance. The actual fighting is almost entirely glossed over in favour of this focus on its impact. Le Guin is interested in exploring the lasting societal violence of colonisation, the damage that remains long after bodies have been buried and forests regrown.
She was thinking of the US war in Vietnam as she wrote Forest, and the parallels are clear. Some of the events in the story are clearly inspired by atrocities such as the My Lai massacre, and the environmental destruction in the novella mirrors the deliberate razing of forests by the US during that war. Even the reaction of humans on Earth who find out about events on Athshe after light-years of delay has parallels to the response to events in Vietnam from Americans an ocean away. Decades later, Le Guin's questions are still pertinent. Unexploded ordinance[1] still litters Vietnam, Cambodia, and neighbouring countries. The tonnes of napalm, agent orange, and other chemicals which the US dumped on South East Asia still have lingering impacts on the people and the environment still there. And that's to say nothing of the societal impact that lingers after the war. Even the United States is still reeling from the impact of a war it fought entirely on foreign soil.
Compare this to Avatar. Cameron seems less interested in the impacts of colonisation, and more in the cool sci-fi battles he gets to orchestrate between humans in mech suits and aliens with spears. Between the first Avatar film and its sequel, the planet of Pandora has essentially been reset to the state it was in when everything kicked off. Sure, good old American boy, and white-saviour protagonist Jake Sully is now considered a member of the indigenous Na'avi, but aside from his presence (and a few ruined mechs rusting in the forest) the Na'avi have gone back to their way of life as though the horrors of the first film were nothing more than a bad dream. The perfect backdrop for another CGI-fuelled action blockbuster!
Cameron has been (rightly) criticised online[2] for saying around the time of the first Avatar's release[3] that the Lakota Sioux may have "fought a lot harder" against their own colonisation if they could have seen their own future (in a particularly offensive aside he referred to the Lakota Sioux as "a dead-end society"). These comments (and his films) suggest that Cameron thinks the impacts of colonisation could be erased, prevented, or undone if colonised peoples had simply fought hard enough against them. Nowhere is Le Guin's acknowledgement of how even a successful anti-colonial struggle will not undo the violence that is inherent in colonisation.
It's in these differing presentations that "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" can be found. It's an essay in which Le Guin discusses storytelling, gender, and human society. The eponymous "carrier bag" is a reference to her distinction between stories of early human societies surviving by the strength of the hunter who returns with the flesh of the mammoth to feed his tribe, and the untold but much more realistic story of the carrier bag filled one at a time with foraged mushrooms. Le Guin sees the focus in fiction on heroic battles, masculine warriors, and heart-pounding excitement as an omission of the real foundations of human society, and the work which keeps societies alive. She urges storytellers to shift their focus to the carrier bag, the overlooked (often feminine) labour which underpin human societies.
In case it's unclear, Cameron seems to embody exactly the kind of storytelling that "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" opposes. He is an uncurious sensationalist, interested only in the spectacle and drama of whatever action he's able to fit onscreen. His sci-fi colonisation story is really little more than a pretty backdrop for this spectacle. Le Guin, on the other hand is interested in the personal and the social consequences of the violence she depicts. Forest is science-fiction at its best: it uses it explores the history and politics of the world it was written in by mirroring and exaggerating that world in fiction.
The novella has its flaws. I think that her treatment of her indigenous protagonists in particular is imperfect. Le Guin may not be James Cameron, whose films are almost laughable for their repetition of white saviour and noble savage tropes; she is even relatively ahead of her time as a white author writing in the 1970s. But there is a certain simplicity to the society she has created which does it a disservice. It's nothing egregious, and perhaps it's a side-effect of this being a relatively short story, but I imagine indigenous readers might find her depiction of the Athsheans too shallow. Her explorations of gender are also not as interesting as those found in, for example, The Left Hand of Darkness or her Earthsea novels. But there are aspects of ideas found in those novels and "Carrier Bag" to be seen here.
Conclusion
This hasn't really been a review so much as a comparative essay. Sorry I guess, but I needed to get these thoughts out somehow. If these ideas interested you then I promise this novella is interesting for much more than its comparisons to Avatar. Le Guin's writing is rich with thematic content, and thought-provoking questions. I adore writing which challenges and provokes, and Le Guin (as always) delivers in spades. It's not perfect, but this novella expands the bounds of literature, in worthwhile and fascinating ways.
[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-vietnam-war-is-still-killing-people
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Indigenous/comments/znivxa/so_avatars_james_cameron_referred_to_the_lakota/
[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/apr/18/avatar-james-cameron-brazil-dam
[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-vietnam-war-is-still-killing-people
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Indigenous/comments/znivxa/so_avatars_james_cameron_referred_to_the_lakota/
[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/apr/18/avatar-james-cameron-brazil-dam
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Racism, Violence, and Colonisation
Moderate: Rape, Sexism, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Murder, and Fire/Fire injury
Minor: Drug abuse, Drug use, Racial slurs, and Xenophobia
bradblaz's review against another edition
dark
emotional
hopeful
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Torture, Violence, Xenophobia, and War
Moderate: Sexual assault and Sexual violence
wormgirl's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Genocide, Slavery, Violence, Xenophobia, Trafficking, Colonisation, and War
Moderate: Misogyny, Rape, Sexism, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Murder, and Fire/Fire injury
Minor: Drug use
ehmannky's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
It's truly a crime that Le Guin isn't more widely read because the Hainish cycle rules and does so much with the science fiction genre. I've read that she came to see this book as a sort of preachy (she wrote it as part of her involvement against the Vietnam War, so that's to be expected), but I thought it kind of worked for this. I also think that the character of Davidson was brilliant and kind of encapsulates a sort of white man that resembles Trump and Rambo and it's so angry in its view. It's great overall and a good place to jump into the Hainish cycle if you don't feel like starting with the longer and more complex novels.
This book is more of a 4.5 read for me (just a bit knocked off for some outdated language and terms, but this book was written about 50 years ago so it's to be expected), but it's so good.
This book is more of a 4.5 read for me (just a bit knocked off for some outdated language and terms, but this book was written about 50 years ago so it's to be expected), but it's so good.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Slavery, Violence, Xenophobia, and War
Moderate: Rape and Sexual assault
Minor: Sexism
hanz's review against another edition
challenging
dark
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Confinement, Death, Physical abuse, Racial slurs, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Slavery, Violence, Murder, Fire/Fire injury, Colonisation, and Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Drug use, Gun violence, and Grief
bluejay21's review against another edition
challenging
dark
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism, Slavery, Violence, Xenophobia, Murder, and Colonisation
Moderate: Death, Rape, Sexual assault, and Fire/Fire injury
swarmofbees's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Genocide, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Murder, Fire/Fire injury, and Colonisation
pearrots's review against another edition
dark
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
3 Tragic heroes within the same short novella. I would recommend this story to anyone who likes multiple viewpoints, complex characters, or the exploration of race/sexuality/identity in a fantastical setting.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Drug use, Racism, Slavery, and Xenophobia
Minor: Rape, Sexism, Sexual assault, and Violence