Add new comment

Omg, Ursula K Le Guin is really the best!
I first read The Word for World is Forest because someone said this very thing, that it was Avatar but way better.
This analysis from Gelderloos is the best I've read so far. Particularly this point:
"Ursula never condemns armed resistance by the Athsheans; in fact, she clearly portrays it as necessary to their survival. What she actually does is to complicate this resistance by raising the very ethical, very anarchist question of the effect of organizing systematic violence on those who resist. This is also one of the central questions in Fredy Perlman's Against His-story, Against Leviathan. Fredy makes it clear that the physical elimination of Leviathan can never be the primary task of those who rebel; rather, their task must be reinhabiting the world as a community of living things, expressed as a subversive dance that removes the the Leviathanic, psychological armor and knocks down the obstacles to free life."

I also liked this bit
"This is the transhumanist vision of nature and spirituality that is rapidly growing as a new paradigm. Connecting with nature is predicated on improving technology—obviating the fact that the technology relies on stealing native bodies and cutting down the forests—and it claims a liberatory mantle by further propagating the eurocentric lie that away from the cutting edge of Western Civilization, differently abled people are completely and utterly neglected. The immature fear of death, in this case the need to be uploaded to a cloud so as not to miss anything, is a common element of both the Enlightenment and the transhumanist paradigms, relying entirely on the Christian division of body and soul and hatred for the body. Needless to say, this is a fear that has caused a great deal of harm."

I think we do not need to anoint UKLG as goddess though, as great a writer as she is/was let's not put her attainments so far out of reach.