The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin
169 pages
Published 1972
Read April 20
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
This one felt a bit flimsy and unremarkable compared to The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. It felt closer to an early '70s children's book than the Le Guin classics I know and love; Sweetwater
in particular sprang to mind. I think the main difference between this
and her best work is the lack of personal emotional resonance here,
which in turn comes from a lack of fully fleshed out characters. Each
character is barely more than a broadly drawn figure to represent a
particular perspective on the contact of cultures. I guess it's kind of
neat that the main antagonist would, in more traditional hands, have
been a blandly virile action hero protagonist; Le Guin paints him as a
sociopathic, paranoid genocidist who thinks he's a good ol' boy and the
planet's resident good guy. And even a weak Le Guin novel will delight
me, given how much her work sources from anthropology; The Word for World
is in essence a novel of culture contact and the cultural disarray that
results from it. So this one was pretty good, not great, just a nice
quick read.
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