The Word for World is Forest is set in a future in which Terra (planet Earth) has colonized various planets to mine their natural resources. On World 41, known to Terrans (Earth-based humans) as New Tahiti, the Terrans have enslaved native inhabitants called Athsheans and forced them to log wood. But eventually, the Athsheans—who were previously a nonviolent species—fight back against the colonists by destroying their weaponry and killing both men and women. The Athsheans succeed in driving out the Terrans, a retaliation that’s necessary for the Athsheans’ survival but also damaging for them—it means that the Athsheans now know how to hurt one another, and their people can no longer remain nonviolent. By presenting this complicated outcome, the novella suggests that violence and war are zero-sum games. Furthermore, the existence of violence always generates more violence, whether it’s justified or not.
From the start, the novella demonstrates that the humans’ violence is what forces the Athsheans to become violent. The Athsheans are ordinarily a nonviolent species with substitutes for physical combat, and the novella implies that violence against one another is unfathomable to them—in fact, if any member of society does become violent, they’re immediately isolated on an island. However, the Athsheans are capable of violence, as young Athsheans sometimes wrestle before learning alternatives. This implies that the reason the Athsheans are peaceful isn’t because they’re fundamentally different from humans in this way, but because they’ve made a conscious decision to form a nonviolent society. Eventually, one of the humans on New Tahiti, Captain Davidson, models violence for the Athsheans when he rapes and kills an Athshean woman named Thele. Although the humans were violent toward the Athsheans before Thele’s death, this especially egregious act of violence prompts Thele’s husband, Selver, to try to kill Davidson. In this way, Davidson’s violence against Thele directly causes Selver’s violence against Davidson, which the novella implies is the first Athshean attack on a human. The Athsheans’ violence toward humans continues after Selver’s first attack on Davidson, as the Athsheans want to drive the humans out of World 41. But even though the Athsheans have a specific goal, their attacks are usually retaliation rather than blind aggression. For instance, the Athsheans burn down Centralville, the human city, after Davidson goes rogue and raids an Athshean village, and they attack Davidson’s later hideout, New Java, after Davidson bombs their forest. In both of these cases, Davidson’s attacks are what prompt the Athsheans’ attacks—their violence is modeled on his.
The Athsheans’ violence is ultimately successful, which proves that it was necessary—their goal of driving out the humans couldn’t have been accomplished in any other way. Raj Lyubov, a human anthropologist living on New Tahiti, frequently spoke out against the humans’ treatment of the Athsheans before the Athsheans became violent. Not only did no one listen to his protests, but his written documentation of the Athsheans’ enslavement never even reached planet Earth. Clearly, the humans were never planning to let the enslaved Athshean go, and no diplomacy would convince them. In the end, the humans only remove their weaponry, let their slaves go, and isolate themselves from the Athsheans after they see the damage that the Athsheans can do. The humans always knew that they were outnumbered by the Athsheans, but they never thought of the Athsheans as a threat until they realized they were capable of mass violence.
However, the Athsheans’ violence is also permanently damaging to their society, even though it was necessary because of the humans’ violence. The Athsheans spend large chunks of their time in dream states, and their dreams are often shared across large distances. After the attacks on humans begin, Selver guesses that many of his people are dreaming of burning cities and won’t be able to stop until the humans leave the planet. Meanwhile, Selver himself can’t control his dreams anymore (which the Athsheans can normally do), as many of his dreams are violent fantasies. Coro Mena, an elderly Athshean who’s referred to as “Great Dreamer,” tells Selver that this damage could be permanent. The humans’ violence—and the Athsheans’ violence in response—will forever change Athshean society. He tells Selver that Selver did what he had to do by attacking the humans, but Coro Mena also notes that it was the wrong thing to do, since it involved murder. In other words, Selver’s violence was necessary, but that necessity doesn’t make it morally right, and his choice will have lasting consequences. At the end of the novella, the humans are preparing to leave World 41 and head back to Terra after three years of neutrality with the Athsheans. Lepennon, a non-Terran human, asks Selver whether the Athsheans have begun to hurt and kill one another, even though they stopped killing humans. Though Selver doesn’t answer Lepennon directly, he tells him that the Athsheans’ world won’t return to what it was—implying that the Athsheans have become violent. Much like the humans’ violence initially spurred the Athsheans to attack, the Athsheans’ violence continues to generate more violence. This suggests that even when necessary, violence and war are cyclical and produce no clear winners.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Violence, War, and Colonization ThemeTracker
Violence, War, and Colonization Quotes in The Word for World is Forest
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.
Davidson saw then the telltale tension of the creature’s stance, yet it sprang at him so lithe and oblique that his shot missed, burning an arm or shoulder instead of smack between the eyes. And the creechie was on him, half his size and weight yet knocking him right off balance by its onslaught, for he had been relying on the gun and not expecting attack. The thing’s arms were thin, tough, coarse-furred in his grip, and as he struggled with it, it sang.
He was down on his back, pinned down, disarmed. […] He had never looked up into a creechie’s face from below. Always down, from above. From on top. He tried not to struggle, for at the moment it was wasted effort. Little as they were, they outnumbered him, and Scarface had his gun.
Davidson’s hands were steady now, his body felt appeased, and he knew he wasn’t caught in any dream. He headed back over the Straits, to take the news to Centralville. As he flew he could feel his face relax into its usual calm lines. They couldn’t blame the disaster on him, for he hadn’t even been there. Maybe they’d see that it was significant that the creechies had struck while he was gone, knowing they’d fail if he was there to organize the defense. And there was one good thing that would come out of this. They’d do like they should have done to start with, and clean up the planet for human occupation. Not even Lyubov could stop them from rubbing out the creechies now, not when they heard it was Lyubov’s pet creechie who’d led the massacre! They’d go in for rat-extermination for a while, now; and maybe, just maybe, they’d hand that little job over to him. At that thought he could have smiled.
“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.”
He went out to see what kind of trees they were. They all lay broken and uprooted. He picked up the silvery branch of one and a little blood ran out of the broken end. No, not here, not again, Thele, he said: O Thele, come to me before your death! But she did not come. […] Outside the other door, across the tall room, was the long street of the yumen city Central. Selver had the gun in his belt. If Davidson came, he could shoot him. He waited, just inside the open door, looking out into the sunlight. Davidson came, huge, running so fast that Selver could not keep him in the sights of the gun as he doubled crazily back and forth across the wide street, very fast, always closer. The gun was heavy. Selver fired it but no fire came out of it, and in rage and terror he threw the gun and the dream away.
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?
“A human society with an effective war-barrier! What’s the cost, Dr. Lyubov?”
“I’m not sure, Mr. Lepennon. Perhaps change. They’re a static, stable, uniform society. They have no history. Perfectly integrated, and wholly unprogressive. You might say that like the forest they live in, they’ve attained a climax state. But I don’t mean to imply that they’re incapable of adaptation.”
[…]
“Well, I wonder if they’re not proving their adaptability, now. By adapting their behavior to us. To the Earth Colony. 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. However, 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.”
“No,” said the Cetian. “That’s done with. A colony like this had to believe what passing ships and outdated radio-messages told them. Now you don’t. You can verify. We are going to give you the ansible destined for Prestno. We have League authority to do so. Received, of course, by ansible. Your colony here is in a bad way. Worse than I thought from your reports. Your reports are very incomplete; censorship or stupidity have been at work. Now, however, you’ll have the ansible, and can talk with your Terran Administration; you can ask for orders, so you’ll know how to proceed. Given the profound changes that have been occurring in the organization of the Terran Government since we left there, I should recommend that you do so at once. There is no longer any excuse for acting on outdated orders; for ignorance; for irresponsible autonomy.”
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!
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.
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.
And the translator is the god. Selver had brought a new word into the language of his people. He had done a new deed. The word, the deed, murder. Only a god could lead so great a newcomer as Death across the bridge between the worlds.
But had he learned to kill his fellowmen among his own dreams of outrage and bereavement, or from the undreamed-of-actions of the strangers? Was he speaking his own language, or was he speaking Captain Davidson’s? That which seemed to rise from the root of his own suffering and express his own changed being, might in fact be an infection, a foreign plague, which would not make a new people of his race, but would destroy them.
They had taken up the fire they feared into their own hands: taken up the mastery over the evil dream: and loosed the death they feared upon their enemy. […] Selver could scarcely see; he looked up to the east, wondering if it were nearing dawn. Kneeling there in the mud among the dead he thought, This is the dream now, the evil dream. I thought to drive it, but it drives me.
“Should we have let them live?” said Selver with vehemence equal to Gosse’s, but softly, his voice singing a little. “To breed like insects in the carcass of the World? To overrun us? We killed them to sterilize you. I know what a realist is, Mr. Gosse. Lyubov and I have talked about these words. A realist is a man who knows both the world and his own dreams. You’re not sane: there’s not one man in a thousand of you who knows how to dream. Not even Lyubov and he was the best among you. You sleep, you wake and forget your dreams, you sleep again and wake again, and so you spend your whole lives, and you think that is being, life, reality! You are not children, you are grown men, but insane. And that’s why we had to kill you, before you drove us mad.”
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.
Something stirred down inside him, something almost like laughter. By God they couldn’t get him down! If his own men betrayed him, and human intelligence couldn’t do any more for him, then he used their own trick against them—played dead like this, and triggered this instinct reflex that kept them from killing anybody who took that position. They just stood around him, muttering at each other. They couldn’t hurt him. It was as if he was a god.
“Look, Captain Davidson,” the creechie said in that quiet little voice that made Davidson go dizzy and sick, “we’re both gods, you and I. You’re an insane one, and I’m not sure whether I’m sane or not. But we are gods. There will never be another meeting in the forest like this meeting now between us. We bring each other such gifts as gods bring. You gave me a gift, the killing of one’s kind, murder. Now, as well as I can, I give you my people’s gift, which is not killing. I think we each find each other’s gift heavy to carry. However, you must carry it alone. Your people at Eshsen tell me that if I bring you there, they have to make a judgment on you and kill you, it’s their law to do so. So, wishing to give you life, I can’t take you with the other prisoners to Eshsen; and I can’t leave you to wander in the forest, for you do too much harm. So you’ll be treated like one of us when we go mad. You’ll be taken to Rendlep where nobody lives any more, and left there.”
“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.”
