The Word for World is Forest (Hainish Cycle, #5)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

What would they say on old Earth if they saw one man eating a kilogram of meat at one meal? Poor damn soybeansuckers!

Even in the 1970s did fictional douchebag manly men used the soyboy insult!

I wish he was a woman and would talk sense. .

The most winning characteristic of the rather harsh Cetian temperament was curiosity, inopportune and inexhaustible curiosity; Cetians died eagerly, curious as to what came next.

But what the hell was the use coming twenty-seven lightyears to a frontier world and then get told no guns, no firejelly, no bugbombs, no, no, just sit like nice little boys and let the creechies come spit in your faces and sing songs at you and then stick a knife in your guts and burn down your camp, but don’t you hurt the cute little green fellers, no sir!

Athshe, which meant the Forest, and the World. So Earth, Terra, meant both the soil and the planet, two meanings and one. But to the Athsheans soil, ground, earth was not that to which the dead return and by which the living live: the substance of their world was not earth, but forest. Terran man was clay, red dust. Athshean man was branch and root. They did not carve figures of themselves in stone, only in wood.