Try looking at a stand of timber as just lumber after this.
The Word for World Is Forest
Human colonists are destroying an alien forest, forcing its peaceful inhabitants to learn the terrible art of resistance.
162g
Weighs the same as Sawyer Squeeze + Tuna Packet
- Lightweight
- Changes the Way You See
- Sci-Fi
Ursula K. Le Guin wrote this short, furious, Hugo-winning novella with Vietnam on the television. Earth has come to the forest planet Athshe for lumber, bringing chains and logging camps. To survive extinction, the dream-focused green inhabitants being worked to death must learn the one art humans brought with them: violence. Le Guin exposes how imperialism ruins both the soil and the soul. Read this book under the canopy, then try looking at a stand of timber as just lumber.
Field notes
Le Guin wrote this novella in 1968, furious about the Vietnam War, and later said she had never written anything more easily—or with less pleasure. She had wanted to explore the relationship between forests and dreams, but her anger at ecological destruction and American militarism overtook the story. She worried afterward that the book's political urgency might compromise its imaginative freedom. That unease gives the novella a revealing tension: the Athsheans possess a culture in which dreaming and waking life sustain one another, but Le Guin found herself writing about what happens when violence enters a world that has no place for it.