Pre-Post week 11--The Word for World is Forest--a real page turner!

Pre-Post week 11—responding to Ursula Le Guin first four chapters

Because I am a Le Guin fan, I really enjoyed reading the FAQ on her website.  This is one of my favorite quotes—“I love living almost as well as I love writing. It was tough trying to keep writing while bringing up three kids, but my husband was totally in it with me, and so it worked out fine. Le Guins' Rule: One person cannot do two fulltime jobs, but two persons can do three fulltime jobs — if they honestly share the work.  The idea that you need an ivory tower to write in, that if you have babies you can't have books, that artists are somehow exempt from the dirty work of life — rubbish.”
And I was encouraged by reading the rejection letter she got for the award winning Left Hand of Darkness. I have a funny story about this book.  We had it in our house, and Rickey and I had both zipped right through it.  Our babysitter found it on the end table got hooked reading it after our girls had gone to bed. She took it home and stayed up reading it at her house and left it on the coffee table.  Her dad came in and picked it up.  He spent the day reading it, and at church on Sunday he ran up to me asking, “Does Le Guin have any more books like that?”   This is hardly a boring book, and I bet the editor who missed that connection was sorry later.

This is my second time to read The Word for World is Forest, and although I really enjoyed it my first time through, I’m discovering things I missed the first time.  For instance, the whole ansible thing, instant communication device, which sounds a lot like computers to me.  Pretty prophetic because PCs weren’t even around in the early 70s. And I loved how Ursula Le Guin had a sense of humor about it--In Dispossessed,(c 1974) the ansible gets invented; but they're using it in Left Hand(c 1968) (and in The Word for World is Forest c 1972) Please do not try to explain this to me. I will not understand.

The second time through I knew I was pulling for the creechies—a meter tall and covered with green fur. And I knew that Captain Davidson view of creechies as lazy, dumb, treacherous, and not able to feel pain was dead wrong. In fact, the whole naming thing caught my attention this time.  Sam was really Selver from Sornol, not a Creechie. Creechie was a derogatory slang term for Asthenians, which were indeed humans. (I’m told it is quite common for American soldiers to call Iraq citizens Hajjis. Creating negative terms has a long sour history, doesn’t it? )

Interestingly, it is only when the review board from the visiting space ship confronts the core issue of humanness that the problems are brought to light and named. (p 76) Or interrupted the Colonel. “…But you knew that the hilfs of this planet are human? As human as you or I or Lepennon—since we call came from the same, original, Hainish stock?

“This is the scientific theory, I am aware—“

“Colonel, it is the historic fact.”

“I am not forced to accept it as a fact…” the old Colonel said.

Indeed! This not accepting of fact had terrible consequences for everyone—death and destruction. The only character who cared, Dr. Lyubov, powerfully expressed the concern wondering “...if they (the creechies )are not proving their adaptability…For four years they’ve behaved to us as they do to one another. Despite the physical differences, they recognized us as members of their species, as men…we have not responded as members of their species should respond.  We have ignored the responses, the rights and obligations of non-violence.  We have killed, raped, dispersed, and enslaved the native humans, destroyed their communities, and cut down their forests. It wouldn’t be surprising if they’d decided that we are not human.” (p 75).

I deeply enjoyed rereading the section where Selver returns to the forest for healing. I liked that it included a deep connection to dreaming. And I had to smile when Le Guin made the men the primary dreamers (Biblical isn’t it—your old men will dream dreams and your young men will see visions?) The women ran the cities and towns. The women were the doers—(p 96) He (her brother the Great Dreamer) saw what must be done; she saw that it was done.

I’m looking forward to finishing the book.  It is a real page turner, too—even the second time around.