“Are you of the ‘dream-time’ or the ‘world-time’? ”

Ursula K. Le Guin

The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin is a novella published in 1976 and is part of Le Guin’s ‘Hainish Cycle’ series of books. The book sheds some heavy light on colonialism as it takes us on some deep and very difficult-to-read parts of the story.

The world that Ursula created for this book is called New Tahiti, inhabited by small green-furred beings called Creechies. Men came from earth to extract resources from the forests of New Tahiti, after all, ‘Earth needs wood, needs it bad.’ They rely on creechie labour as orders from people in higher positions to basically deforest the creechies’ world, after which they become enslaved. Creechies never slept, they just sat and stared. The story goes off from the point of views of the big ol’ baddie, Davidson, and one of the creechies, Selver and there’s a lot to talk about when it comes to this short book and I could keep going on and on.

I really enjoyed my third Le Guin read, but maybe not as much as I enjoyed The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. I could feel Le Guin’s anger radiate from the pages as I read along and it being a novella felt like a burst of very high energy of wrath beamed at me, the reader. Definitely read this if you’re into feeling uncomfortable for a while.