The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin

[james_davis_nicoll]

The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin

Comments

[ba_munronoe]

Until when did Le Guin keep writing Hainish novels? Because the 1972 publication, two years before the discovery of Lucy, is IMHO about as late as you can write a "humans don't come from Earth" novel without clearly being in denial about what should be common knowledge for anyone writing SF. (Larry Niven's "Protector" was 1973)

[voidampersand]

Le Guin was winning awards for Hainish stories well into the 1990s.

The Anthropology building at the University of California is named after Ursula's father. I would expect her to know better than most. However, her science fiction is not about explaining where people came from. It is about diversity in cultures and interactions between cultures. It is more powerful and interesting precisely because so many of the different cultures are biologically human.

[voidampersand]

Not that Larry Niven was trying to explain where humans came from either. It was never a plausible theory — just a cool story idea.

[ba_munronoe]

Well, it's not like anyone was claiming _LeGuin_ as a hard SF writer... :)

[voidampersand]

Which is really funny because if the definition of a hard science fiction writer is someone who gets the science better than Le Guin, there aren't very many of them.

[roseembolism]

Hard science fiction in physics from the 1970s, biology from the 1950s, and social science from the 1920s- or 1820s if its milfic.

[roseembolism]

Hard science fiction is physics from the 1970s, biology from the 1950s, and social science from the 1920s- or 1820s if its milfic.

[mindstalk]

Hain *started* in 1964, which may be more relevant; once you have a useful universe, I can see continuing to use it, even if warts are revealed later. Wrote in it as late as 2000.

[glaurung]

My headcanon for all universes which have humans or human-looking people on many worlds that are not colonies of Earth:

Humans evolved on Earth, but at some point in time someone unknown is assumed to have invented time travel and caused human settlements to be placed on other worlds throughout the galaxy in the distant past. This must be so because genetic testing shows that all those worlds of humans and human-like people, many of which have histories going back before humans evolved on Earth, are clearly descended from Earth humans.

[ba_munronoe]

Neat idea: and if your universe has time travel, it probably has FTL as well, so they can all meet up.

Or if you don't need planets which have had humans far longer than Earth has, you don't need time travel, just aliens with a ecological bent (like the Preservers on Star Trek, the aliens responsible for the godawful "Kirk becomes an American Indian" episode).

(And then there's Big Ancestor by FL Wallace, in which early hominids take the role of ship's rats in the spaceships of gigantic and very slow-moving slug-like aliens).

[(Anonymous)]

> aliens with an ecological bent

Or aliens with a keen eye for servitor species, like Grandfather in *Traveller*.

[keith_morrison]

Seen multiple times, such as the Stargate universe.

DC Comics has used it as well. To explain all the planets with humans who had special abilities as seen in the Legion of Superheroes books set in the 30th Century, the 1988 "Invasion!" crossover had them be the descendants of 20th Century humans abducted and experimented on by the Dominators, the survivors having become metahumans thanks to having the metagene. They settled on different planets after being rescued by the Daxamite hero Valor, were fruitful and multiplied.

[(Anonymous)]

See Charles Stross' Eschaton universe

[agharta75]

Cherryh did that in the Morgaine series.

[(Anonymous)]

Protector is an expansion of a 1967 work (The Adults).

[(Anonymous)]

"Protector" is an expansion of a 1967 Niven story (The Adults).

[ba_munronoe]

Interestingly, the story has never be republished after it's initial Galaxy appearance, according to the isfdb: too long for collection purposes?

[redbird]

The Left Hand of Darkness includes one of the Ekumenical characters musing that, now that there's evidence that the Terran colony was an experiment, the planting of a colony on a world with native humanoid species, she is wondering whether the Gethenians were also an experiment. "It's a disturbing thought."

Here in 2020 it's clear that humans are closely related to chimps and bonobos, and that we're all descended from earlier primate species, and so on back to early unicellular eukaryotes: but in 1970 "here's a handwave that humans look like other primates but aren't their biological cousins" was good enough for novel-writing.

[roseembolism]

I remember it popping up enough in books like This Star Shall Abide and The Turning Place. Among others.