Ursula K. Le Guin - The Word for World is Forest

When yumens arrive on Athshe they find themselves in the midst of plenty. Earth is short of crucial resources, but Athshe is covered in one of them - its lush forests providing enormous quantities of wood. The only people who live there are the primitive indigenous people, who are easily convinced to work, in slave like conditions for the yumens - as servants, labourers, and sex workers.

The Athsheans live a peaceful existence, their culture, art and communications are almost incomprehensible to the yumens, with the exception of Raj Lyubov the human colony's anthropologist who recognises that the Athsean are just different humans. They are not subhuman as most of the colony thins, its just that their culture is so different they are viewed as being lesser, childlike and alien.

Lyubov clashes with one of the colony's leaders, Captain Davidson. Davidson is in charge of a logging camp, meaning he directly overseas the forced labour of the locals. He is also a violent man, whose rape of the wife of one of the Athsheans, Selver, helps precipitate a revolt. Selver organisies, or reorganises the Atsean, leading them in a serious of brilliant military attacks that destroy the human colony and force Earth to withdraw.

First published in 1972, this is clearly a novel heavily influneced by the US war in Vietnam. Ursula Le Guin's criticism of US imperialism is clearly on display. Yet that's not the best analogy for the book - in fact it seems to me to be much more about the settler colonialism of the US within its own country - how the stripping of resources undermined and forced Native Americans into confrontation with the US military. In the 21st century, the struggle for resources (in this case wood) takes on a different sheen as well.

The brilliance of the novel lies in Le Guin's ability to show the incomprehension of the humans in the face of Athshean culture. Like countless encounters between European colonists and indigenous people, from Africa, to Asia and the Americas, the Athsheans are dismissed as childlike, lazy, stupid or subhuman. But Le Guin takes us into the alien mind, showing us an alternative world view, that clashes with the Earthling's quest for profit. But, in this encounter, the Athsheans cannot be unchanged. We are left knowing that things will never be the same again.

This is an incredible novel that stays with the reader long after finishing, and illuminates, perhaps more than Le Guin realised, the struggles we face today.

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