The Word for World is Forest.
Just finished Ursula K. Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest, and I have a few thoughts, so I'm going to put them down here because it's doubtful they'd make a very good review, scattered and incomplete as they are. ^^;;
From Goodreads.com:
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.
Let the random thoughts commence!
Davidson Is Just a Jerk, Really.
Captain Davidson is an awful man. There is actually nothing good about him at all. He has a skewed sense of loyalty; his prejudices against anything different from himself (the man manages to make racist remarks aimed at Asians while on an alien planet, and that's not even the half of it) prevent him from acting rationally; he's a sick, macho misogynist; he's paranoid; he's hypocritical; and he's cruel. All that, and it's his narrative perspective (third person limited) that starts off the novella. Because it needs to. He's a completely necessary character for the story to take off. I hate him from the bottom of my heart, but it makes me so happy that Le Guin took this route rather than the Corporate Money-Hungry Bad Guy route that is so overdone today. Instead, she's made the villain this gun-toting, trigger-happy, hyper-masculine sludge bucket of a man who, rather than knowing he's an awful person because he's the Corporate Bad Guy, believes himself to be entirely in the right the whole time. He is actually insane. It's hilarious, and it's frustrating.
Touch Me in the Moooorniiiiing~♪
Now, the status of the world has changed a bit between now and whatever time this book is set in (a bajillion years in the future). Earth has turned entirely to cityscape and desert wasteland--the usual, you know. Besides that, though, I thought Le Guin's elimination of touch as a mere friendly gesture among humans was an interesting choice. To "Terrans," touch is only ever either aggressive or erotic--nothing in between, pretty much. It's interesting, I guess, because for one, I'd always thought of the '70s as a very touchy-feely kind of decade. And secondly, I dunno, I hug my friends all the time. Lean on them, drape my arms about them, be a general pain in the ass, etc. And a couple of weeks ago, when I went out for Cinco de Mayo / my birthday with my coworkers, practically everyone I met that night greeted me with a kiss on the cheek. "WTF?!" I thought. But after reading Le Guin's small section on how humans barely touch each other casually anymore (from the perspective of a million-jillion years from now), I must say, I'd prefer my personal bubble be popped in a friendly manner such as this, than to never be touched.
The Moral of the Story.
The novella ends with Selver saying that he doesn't believe things will ever go back to the way they were before he brought murder and war to the Athsheans, a concept that he took from humans, Terrans. It's the same here on Earth, really, with our own forests and the way we interact with nature even now. Even if we fix things, conserve, save the rainforests, repair what we've royally messed up, all that, the damage we've done so far can never be erased. Sure, we can tell ourselves how well we did by stopping total destruction (if, indeed, we do prevent such a thing), and that's all very well, but we can't just be complacent. We ought to own up to our mistakes. We've done things, irreversible things, and we owe it to ourselves never to forget that.
From Goodreads.com:
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.
Let the random thoughts commence!
Davidson Is Just a Jerk, Really.
Captain Davidson is an awful man. There is actually nothing good about him at all. He has a skewed sense of loyalty; his prejudices against anything different from himself (the man manages to make racist remarks aimed at Asians while on an alien planet, and that's not even the half of it) prevent him from acting rationally; he's a sick, macho misogynist; he's paranoid; he's hypocritical; and he's cruel. All that, and it's his narrative perspective (third person limited) that starts off the novella. Because it needs to. He's a completely necessary character for the story to take off. I hate him from the bottom of my heart, but it makes me so happy that Le Guin took this route rather than the Corporate Money-Hungry Bad Guy route that is so overdone today. Instead, she's made the villain this gun-toting, trigger-happy, hyper-masculine sludge bucket of a man who, rather than knowing he's an awful person because he's the Corporate Bad Guy, believes himself to be entirely in the right the whole time. He is actually insane. It's hilarious, and it's frustrating.
Touch Me in the Moooorniiiiing~♪
Now, the status of the world has changed a bit between now and whatever time this book is set in (a bajillion years in the future). Earth has turned entirely to cityscape and desert wasteland--the usual, you know. Besides that, though, I thought Le Guin's elimination of touch as a mere friendly gesture among humans was an interesting choice. To "Terrans," touch is only ever either aggressive or erotic--nothing in between, pretty much. It's interesting, I guess, because for one, I'd always thought of the '70s as a very touchy-feely kind of decade. And secondly, I dunno, I hug my friends all the time. Lean on them, drape my arms about them, be a general pain in the ass, etc. And a couple of weeks ago, when I went out for Cinco de Mayo / my birthday with my coworkers, practically everyone I met that night greeted me with a kiss on the cheek. "WTF?!" I thought. But after reading Le Guin's small section on how humans barely touch each other casually anymore (from the perspective of a million-jillion years from now), I must say, I'd prefer my personal bubble be popped in a friendly manner such as this, than to never be touched.
The Moral of the Story.
The novella ends with Selver saying that he doesn't believe things will ever go back to the way they were before he brought murder and war to the Athsheans, a concept that he took from humans, Terrans. It's the same here on Earth, really, with our own forests and the way we interact with nature even now. Even if we fix things, conserve, save the rainforests, repair what we've royally messed up, all that, the damage we've done so far can never be erased. Sure, we can tell ourselves how well we did by stopping total destruction (if, indeed, we do prevent such a thing), and that's all very well, but we can't just be complacent. We ought to own up to our mistakes. We've done things, irreversible things, and we owe it to ourselves never to forget that.