The Word for World is Forest

by

Ursula K. Le Guin

Athshe/World 41/New Tahiti Term Analysis

Athshe is the name of the planet that Terran colonists inhabit for the duration of the novella. Its native inhabitants are the Athsheans. Human colonists refer to the planet either as “World 41,” which is its officially designated name, or as “New Tahiti,” which the novella implies is an informal and derogatory designation. Most of Athshe is in forest, and the rest of the planet is water interspersed with isolated islands.

Athshe/World 41/New Tahiti Quotes in The Word for World is Forest

The The Word for World is Forest quotes below are all either spoken by Athshe/World 41/New Tahiti or refer to Athshe/World 41/New Tahiti. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
).
Chapter One Quotes

Get enough humans here, build machines and robots, make farms and cities, and nobody would need the creechies any more. And a good thing too. For this world, New Tahiti, was literally made for men. Cleaned up and cleaned out, the dark forests cut down for open fields of grain, the primeval murk and savagery and ignorance wiped out, it would be a paradise, a real Eden. A better world than worn-out Earth. And it would be his world. For that’s what Don Davidson was, way down deep inside him: a world-tamer. He wasn’t a boastful man, but he knew his own size. It just happened to be the way he was made. He knew what he wanted, and how to get it.

Related Characters: Don Davidson (speaker)
Page Number: 12
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Two Quotes

No way was clear, no light unbroken, in the forest. Into wind, water, sunlight, starlight, there always entered leaf and branch, bole and root, the shadowy, the complex. Little paths ran under the branches, around the boles, over the roots; they did not go straight, but yielded to every obstacle, devious as nerves. The ground was not dry and solid but damp and rather springy, product of the collaboration of living things with the long, elaborate death of leaves and trees; and from that rich graveyard grew ninety-foot trees, and tiny mushrooms that sprouted in circles half an inch across. The smell of the air was subtle, various, and sweet. The view was never long, unless looking up through the branches you caught sight of the stars. Nothing was pure, dry, arid, plain. Revelation was lacking. There was no seeing everything at once: no certainty.

Related Characters: Selver Thele (speaker), Don Davidson
Page Number: 35-36
Explanation and Analysis:

“Before this day the thing we had to do was the right thing to do; the way we had to go was the right way and led us home. Where is our home now? For you’ve done what you had to do, and it was not right. You have killed men. I saw them, five years ago, in the Lemgan Valley, where they came in a flying ship; I hid and watched the giants, six of them, and saw them speak, and look at rocks and plants, and cook food. They are men.”

Related Characters: Coro Mena (speaker), Don Davidson, Selver Thele, Thele
Page Number: 44-45
Explanation and Analysis:

“[…] Much of what he told me, I couldn’t understand. It wasn’t the language that kept me from understanding; I know his tongue, and he learned ours; we made a writing of the two languages together. Yet there were things he said I could never understand. He said the yumens are from outside the forest. That’s quite clear. He said they want the forest: the trees for wood, the land to plant grass on.” Selver’s voice, though still soft, had taken on resonance; the people among the silver trees listened. “That too is clear, to those of us who’ve seen them cutting down the world. He said the yumens are men like us, that we’re indeed related, as close kin maybe as the Red Deer to the Greybuck. He said that they come from another place which is not the forest; the trees there are all cut down; it has a sun, not our sun, which is a star. All this, as you see, wasn’t clear to me. I say his words but don’t know what they mean. It does not matter much. It is clear that they want our forest for themselves […] ”

Related Characters: Selver Thele (speaker), Raj Lyubov
Page Number: 55-56
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Three Quotes

Every man alive except the Captain. No wonder pills couldn’t get at the center of his migraine, for it was on an island two hundred miles away two days ago. Over the hills and far away. Ashes, ashes, all fall down. And among the ashes, all his knowledge of the High Intelligence Life Forms of World 41. Dust, rubbish, a mess of false data and fake hypotheses. Nearly five E-years here, and he had believed the Athsheans to be incapable of killing men, his kind or their kind. He had written long papers to explain how and why they couldn’t kill men. All wrong. Dead wrong.

What had he failed to see?

Related Characters: Raj Lyubov (speaker), Don Davidson, Selver Thele
Page Number: 64-65
Explanation and Analysis:

“ […] We’ve succeeded, here on Central, by following the Plan: erosion is minimal, and the cleared soil is highly arable. To log off a forest doesn’t, after all, mean to make a desert—except perhaps from the point of view of a squirrel. We can’t forecast precisely how the native forest life-systems will adapt to a new woodland-prairie-plowland ambiance foreseen in the Development Plan, but we know the chances are good for a large percentage of adaptation and survival.”

“That’s what the Bureau of Land Management said about Alaska during the First Famine,” said Lyubov. […] “How many Sitka spruce have you seen in your lifetime, Gosse? Or snowy owl? or wolf? or Eskimo? The survival percentage of native Alaskan species in habitat, after 15 years of the Development Program, was .3%. It’s now zero.—A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.”

Related Characters: Raj Lyubov (speaker), Gosse (speaker)
Page Number: 85-86
Explanation and Analysis:

Lyubov sat and took it. Let the men from the ship see them all passing the blame around like a hot brick: all the better. The more dissension they showed, the likelier were these Emissaries to have them checked and watched over. And he was to blame; he had been wrong. To hell with my self-respect so long as the forest people get a chance, Lyubov thought, and so strong a sense of his own humiliation and self-sacrifice came over him that tears rose to his eyes.

Related Characters: Raj Lyubov (speaker), Selver Thele, Mr. Lepennon, Colonel Dongh, Mr. Or
Page Number: 87
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Four Quotes

That was the gist of all the messages actually, and any fool could tell that that wasn’t the Colonial Administration talking. They couldn’t have changed that much in thirty years. They were practical, realistic men who knew what life was like on frontier planets. It was clear, to anybody who hadn’t gone spla from geoshock, that the ‘ansible’ messages were phonies. They might be planted right in the machine, a whole set of answers to high-probability questions, computer run. The engineers said they could have spotted that; maybe so. In that case the thing did communicate instantaneously with another world. But that world wasn’t Earth. Not by a long long shot!

Related Characters: Don Davidson (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Ansible
Page Number: 91-92
Explanation and Analysis:

The fact is, the only time a man is really and entirely a man is when he’s just had a woman or just killed another man. That wasn’t original, he’d read it in some old books; but it was true. That was why he liked to imagine scenes like that. Even if the creechies weren’t actually men.

Related Characters: Don Davidson (speaker), Selver Thele, Thele
Page Number: 96
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Five Quotes

The townsfolk also knew that the 1200 slaves at Centralville had been freed soon after the Smith Camp massacre, and Lyubov agreed with the Colonel that the natives might take the second event to be a result of the first. That gave what Colonel Dongh would call ‘an erroneous impression,’ but it probably wasn’t important. What was important was that the slaves had been freed. Wrongs done could not be righted; but at least they were not still being done. They could start over: the natives without that painful, unanswerable wonder as to why the ‘yumens’ treated men like animals; and he without the burden of explanation and the gnawing of irremediable guilt.

Related Characters: Raj Lyubov (speaker), Don Davidson, Selver Thele, Colonel Dongh
Related Symbols: The Ansible
Page Number: 106-107
Explanation and Analysis:

And that’s one trouble with the colony, he thought as he lifted the hopper and Tuntar vanished beneath the oaks and the leafless orchards. We haven’t got any old women. No old men either, except Dongh and he’s only about sixty. But old women are different from everybody else, they say what they think. The Athsheans are governed, in so far as they have government, by old women. Intellect to the men, politics to the women, and ethics to the interaction of both: that’s their arrangement. It has charm, and it works—for them. I wish the administration had sent out a couple of grannies along with all those nubile fertile high-breasted young women. Now that girl I had over the other night, she’s really very nice, and nice in bed, she has a kind heart, but my God it’ll be forty years before she’ll say anything to a man…

Related Characters: Raj Lyubov (speaker), Don Davidson, Colonel Dongh
Page Number: 115
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Seven Quotes

The raiding party burned up that warren by hand, and then flying back with a couple of his boys he spotted another, less than four kilos from camp. On that one, just to write his signature real clear and plain for everybody to read, he dropped a bomb. Just a firebomb, not a big one, but baby did it make the green fur fly. It left a big hole in the forest, and the edges of the hole were burning.

Of course that was his real weapon when it actually came to setting up massive retaliation. Forest fire. He could set one of these whole islands on fire, with bombs and firejelly dropped from the hopper. Have to wait a month or two, till the rainy season was over. Should he burn King or Smith or Central? King first, maybe, as a little warning, since there were no humans left there. Then Central, if they didn’t get in line.

Related Characters: Don Davidson (speaker), Colonel Dongh
Page Number: 163-164
Explanation and Analysis:

No sound, no noise at all, until that screech from the guard; then one gunshot; then an explosion—a land mine going up—and another, one after another, and hundreds and hundreds of torches flaring up lit one from another and being thrown and soaring through the black wet air like rockets, and the walls of the stockade coming alive with creechies, pouring in, pouring over, pushing, swarming, thousands of them. It was like an army of rats Davidson had seen once when he was a little kid, in the last Famine, in the streets of Cleveland, Ohio, where he grew up. Something had driven the rats out of their holes and they had come up in daylight, seething up over the wall, a pulsing blanket of fur and eyes and little hands and teeth, and he had yelled for his mom and run like crazy, or was that only a dream he’d had when he was a kid?

Related Characters: Don Davidson (speaker), Selver Thele
Page Number: 170
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Eight Quotes

“Sometimes a god comes,” Selver said. “He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.”

Related Characters: Selver Thele (speaker), Don Davidson, Mr. Lepennon
Page Number: 188-189
Explanation and Analysis:
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The Word for World is Forest PDF

Athshe/World 41/New Tahiti Term Timeline in The Word for World is Forest

The timeline below shows where the term Athshe/World 41/New Tahiti appears in The Word for World is Forest. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter One
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
Gender and Masculinity Theme Icon
...shipload of 212 women has just arrived in Centralville. A town on the planet of New Tahiti , Centralville is 27 light-years away from Earth and about four hours by helicopter from... (full context)
Nature and Ecology Theme Icon
Gender and Masculinity Theme Icon
The erosion apparently means that, on New Tahiti , they need to create farmland around stands of trees.  Davidson finds this silly; nobody... (full context)
Gender and Masculinity Theme Icon
...and see the shipload of women, who will be distributed among the 2,000 men on New Tahiti . Most are Colony Brides and only 20-30 are Recreation Staff—he wants to claim one... (full context)
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
Nature and Ecology Theme Icon
Gender and Masculinity Theme Icon
...creechie, but he’s excited not to need them anymore once there are enough humans on New Tahiti . This is the planet’s destiny—it’s been “literally made for men.” Once they’ve cut down... (full context)
Nature and Ecology Theme Icon
...Unlike Kees, Davidson puts Earth first; Earth desperately needs wood, so they’re here to log New Tahiti . Kees scoffs at the idea of remaking New Tahiti into Earth, which is just... (full context)
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
Nature and Ecology Theme Icon
Gender and Masculinity Theme Icon
Kees storms away, and Davidson thinks about deer, which he first saw on New Tahiti —they’re amazing animals, especially compared to the “robodeer” on Earth. It’s only natural to hunt... (full context)
Nature and Ecology Theme Icon
...200 men, they’ve already tamed a good chunk of wilderness—it was “nothing” before, only trees. New Tahiti is largely water, and the rest is forest. On Earth, wood is more valuable than... (full context)
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
Nature and Ecology Theme Icon
New Tahiti has been colonized previously, about a million years before. Someone—it’s not clear who—brought plants and... (full context)
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
...creechies pass, and Ok confesses that creechies freak him out. Davidson agrees—if Lyubov wasn’t on New Tahiti and Colonel Dongh didn’t care about following the Code, Davidson would want the creechies killed... (full context)
Chapter Three
Communication and Translation Theme Icon
...taken medicine to stop this one, but it won’t go away. He wonders what the Athsheans would do to cure a migraine, but really, they’d never have one—they’d daydream the signs... (full context)
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
Lyubov recalls that the Athsheans burned Smith Camp two days ago, an attack that killed 200 men—everyone except Davidson. That’s... (full context)
Communication and Translation Theme Icon
...Or, and one is a Hainishman named Mr. Lepennon. Lepennon compliments Lyubov’s research on the Athsheans’ sleep. Lyubov assumes that the two men have spent time on Earth, but their role... (full context)
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
...glares at Davidson. Commander Yung begins the meeting by saying that he initially came to World 41 to drop off new colonists, but now the attack at Smith has to be addressed—particularly... (full context)
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
...and destroy Smith. Lyubov disrupts the resulting silence by saying that Lepennon misunderstood: the native Athsheans employed at Smith joined with the forest Athsheans to destroy Smith, and the colonists weren’t... (full context)
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
...as he thought “creechie” was the name for a lesser Terran caste. He’d assumed the Athsheans were nonviolent, which makes him more confused than ever about what motivated the attack. Mr.... (full context)
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
Communication and Translation Theme Icon
...along with his studies. Yung has likely seen the creechie-pens where the humans keep the Athsheans prisoner, but Lepennon and Or wouldn’t know anything about Terran colonies. Lyubov wonders why Lepennon... (full context)
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
Communication and Translation Theme Icon
Gender and Masculinity Theme Icon
...explains that Selver’s hatred of Davidson might have partially motivated the recent attack at Smith. Athsheans are capable of violence, which he knows because adolescents who haven’t learned “competitive singing” sometimes... (full context)
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
...back or to the side, since Davidson might have been in a position that the Athsheans would interpret as surrender. Someone is in “prone position” when they’re on their back with... (full context)
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
...that before yesterday, there was almost no such thing as rape or murder for the Athsheans, though accidents have happened (the Athsheans isolate perpetrators on islands). Lepennon is excited by the... (full context)
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
Lepennon is horrified to hear that the Athsheans were enslaved, but Colonel Dongh (Davidson’s superior) says that this is only Lyubov’s opinion, as... (full context)
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
...easy for the Hainish, the same way it’s easy for the “little green men,” the Athsheans. An officer named Benton asks Lepennon if he and Or have authority here, and Lepennon... (full context)
Nature and Ecology Theme Icon
...are destroyed now. The forest ecology here is in danger, he claims, and since the Athsheans’ word for world is also their word for forest, any endangerment to the forest endangers... (full context)
Communication and Translation Theme Icon
...wrongdoing that happens in their absence. Lyubov doesn’t mind losing self-respect as long as the Athsheans can survive, though he feels humiliated and self-sacrificial now. He can also tell that Davidson... (full context)
Chapter Four
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
Nature and Ecology Theme Icon
...the orders from the ansible are insane. They’ve been told to limit contact with the Athsheans unless the Athsheans initiate it, and they can’t enforce labor—which means they can’t work efficiently.... (full context)
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
The messages also say that World 41 ’s colony status is “under consideration,” that colonists can’t use firearms, and that they can’t... (full context)
Chapter Five
Communication and Translation Theme Icon
...the encounter disturbed him. It had taken him awhile to get invited to the nearby Athshean village by a headwoman, but he’d felt that he needed to follow the new rules... (full context)
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
...to reaching the forest. Lyubov had never been inside a forest before he got to Athshe, and he used to feel distressed by the wildness of nature. But he eventually began... (full context)
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
Lyubov touched down and walked into the Athshean settlement. Previously, Lyubov had spent time in the Men’s Lodge, but he knew they wouldn’t... (full context)
Communication and Translation Theme Icon
Lyubov had arrived in the late afternoon, or dawn according to the Athsheans’ inner clock (contrary to colonists’ belief, the Athsheans do sleep). Every 24 hours, adult women... (full context)
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
Nature and Ecology Theme Icon
A passing girl gave Lyubov a dirty look—no Athshean had ever looked at him like that before, and he wondered how the Athshean nature... (full context)
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
Communication and Translation Theme Icon
...greeted Lyubov by offering his hands, as touch is a central mode of communication among Athsheans, which always grossed the colonists out. Selver’s touch reassured Lyubov, who asked to speak with... (full context)
Gender and Masculinity Theme Icon
The sight of Sherrar’s hop was somewhat funny. Terrans react so negatively to Athsheans because of their size and their similarity to human appearance, but admittedly, they’re odd-looking. Thinking... (full context)
Communication and Translation Theme Icon
...Lyubov. Before they met, he was “Sam,” a slave for three officers, including Benton. Many Athsheans were groggy while working in the camp, because they had to adjust their dreaming to... (full context)
Nature and Ecology Theme Icon
Communication and Translation Theme Icon
Lyubov had been studying the Athsheans for years without understanding their sleeping habits, and Selver was the one who helped him... (full context)
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
Communication and Translation Theme Icon
...She died afterwards, either because Davidson killed her, or because she chose to die, which Athsheans can do. Either way, Davidson murdered her, and the next day, Selver attacked him. Frightened... (full context)
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
Communication and Translation Theme Icon
...pick his battles to stay in a position that would allow him to defend the Athsheans and continue to report to the Committee on Rights, who might eventually stop the Open... (full context)
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
...wasn’t reprimanded for helping Selver escape, since there was no policy about that (technically, the Athsheans weren’t slaves). But his colleagues, including the ecologist Gosse, were annoyed. Gosse wanted to know... (full context)
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
Communication and Translation Theme Icon
...reality and speaks subconscious thoughts, therefore changing society “from the root.” This also means changing Athshean society by dreaming (since root is the same word as dream). As a god, Selver... (full context)
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
...situation, but it’s hard not to now.  He can’t do anything more to help the Athsheans survive, as the ansible’s existence protects the Athsheans and Colonel Dongh is following its orders.... (full context)
Communication and Translation Theme Icon
The only thing that might disrupt the balance between colonists and Athsheans is fear. The Athsheans probably aren’t afraid right now, and neither are the colonists, since... (full context)
Communication and Translation Theme Icon
The next day, Lyubov turns in a report saying that Tuntar (the Athshean village) is functioning normally. It’s an inaccurate report, since it leaves out his cold reception,... (full context)
Chapter Seven
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
...has been using Major Muhamed’s tape recorder to make note of everything that’s happened in New Tahiti . Future generations should know how treacherous humans can be. The recording includes everything that... (full context)
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
Communication and Translation Theme Icon
...that if Selver wants to save Davidson’s life, he has to treat Davidson like an Athshean who has gone mad and isolate him on an island. (full context)
Chapter Eight
Communication and Translation Theme Icon
...surmises that they’re reasonable people. He hands them a box of Lyubov’s work on the Athsheans and tells them to take it where Lyubov wanted it to go. The tall man... (full context)
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
...land. Selver observes that yumen orders are quickly followed, which isn’t the case for the Athsheans; one headwoman’s order wouldn’t be followed by the neighboring village. (full context)
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
Communication and Translation Theme Icon
Lepennon tells Selver that he met Lyubov the last time he was on Athshe. He says that Lyubov’s work is now finished, as Athshe is free of Terrans. Selver... (full context)
Violence, War, and Colonization Theme Icon
...Gosse. But Lepennon says that he meant to ask if there had been killings among Athsheans. Selver doesn’t respond. Then he says that sometimes, gods show people new ways of doing... (full context)