I first came across this title via Wayne Barlowe's Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials ; and when I was at the library this last time around, I said to myself: How can you have gotten this far without reading any Ursula K. Le Guin? those short stories just aren't going to cut it, you know! But when they didn't have A Wizard of Earthsea , I decided to go for this one. Mostly because it was short. (And I figured: Why not sneak in another book to put me two ahead of pace for this year's goal? [1])

What le Guin gives us with The Word for World is Forest is a pretty straightforward piece of (arguably) first-contact [2] sci-fi with strong ecological themes and some feminist undertones. The ecological themes are not subtle: a mono-climatic planet with "peaceful primitive" forest-dwelling natives? forced into slave labor by a colonizing human race that's just there for the lumber? But with fewer than 200 pages in this title, who has time for subtlety? Le Guin hits you with the point early and runs you over with it.

The feminist themes are a little more subtle.

Overall, an enjoyable book — and though it had some moments of outstanding prose, the not-so-subtle plot sometimes translated into some not-so-subtle wordsmithery. I've enjoyed le Guin's short stories in the past though, so I'll be back for ...Earthsea and others, I'm sure.

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[1] : Please ignore The Happy Man and His Dump Truck ; I really don't know how that got on there.

[2] : I say "arguably" first-contact because (1) the first contact aspect is not the central theme — that would be the ecological stuff — and (2) because if this is a "first contact" story, it is only implied. I say it is only implied because the text is peppered with these oblique references to how the Athsheans have had no concept of murder prior to encountering human-kind etc. — but never "knowing murder" is different than never knowing another species. And none of the Athshean characters ever comes out and says that the humans ("yumans") are the first ever to come. And all this world-time/dream-time stuff is another oblique hat-tip to cyclical history, which just further undermines any definitive claims to this being "first contact". And this is to say nothing of the directed panspermia theory referenced in the narrative.