SOURCE: Reid, Suzanne Elizabeth. “Connecting the Hainish Dance and Collective Power: The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, The Word for the World Is Forest, and The Dispossessed.” In Presenting Ursula K. Le Guin, pp. 49-66. New York: Twayne, 1997.

In the following excerpt, Reid outlines the plot and major themes of The Word for the World Is Forest and views the volume to be a collection of stories challenging the morality of American involvement in the Vietnam War.

While exploring mythic questions in the Earthsea series, Ursula K. Le Guin was also considering the effects of various political and social formats on the Hainish world. In these later books, she uses the metaphors of science fiction more skillfully than in her first three novels to articulate the problematic nature of basic assumptions about human nature regarding gender, social and ethnic differences, the value of ownership and...