Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that writing The Word for World is Forest was “like taking dictation from a boss with ulcers.” Eager to play around with the ideas of pioneering sleep researcher Dr. William C. Dement, she intended to make a story about the functions of dreaming-sleep. Instead, however, “the boss wanted to talk about the destruction of ecological balance and the rejection of emotional balance.” In the end, both Ursula and the boss got their way: The Word for World is Forest is a beautiful, nuanced novel about ecology and dreaming.

This is a book that’s really easy to get undergraduate-thesis on. It’s got it all: postcolonial anxiety, gender issues, the environmental angle, and what seems to be a clear-cut parable about the culture shock between indigenous peoples and white imperialism. It takes place a few indeterminate centuries in the future, in a logging colony and military base called “New Tahiti” on the planet of Athshe. Every square foot of Athshe is covered in forest, and the native inhabitants are small green-furred creatures that the colonists enslave and refer to as “creechies” (the most accurate-sounding made-up racist slur ever). At the outset, “creechies” seem sluggish and disinterestedly obedient, and hence are roundly abused as sub-Human; in reality, however, they exist in a lucid, liminal state that holds the same cultural gravitas as Australian Aboriginal “Dreamtime.” The Asthshean “dream time” is as real to them as what they call “world time;” they don’t sleep, but enter these states at will, and consider the human use of hallucinogens to induce uncontrolled dreaming to be a blasphemy of the nth degree. All this is ignored by the humans — or, as the Asthesheans call them, “yumens.”

The setting is insanely seductive: deep moss giving slightly under the Asthesheans’ feet as they run from village to village, the heaviness of rain on bough, the impenetrable tangle of forest ceasing only at the edge of each continent, at the sea. The forest is understandable as both nurturing and frightening, home and alien.

At the time of its writing, The Word for World is Forest was inevitably a thought piece about the Vietnam war. In terms of current pop culture, the thing this novel most closely resembles is James Cameron’s Avatar; to quote Gary Westfahl, “another epic about a benevolent race of alien beings who happily inhabit dense forests while living in harmony with nature until they are attacked and slaughtered by invading human soldiers who believe that the only good gook is a dead gook.”

Of course The Word for World is Forest isn’t as stupid, nor is its conflict as simple as tree-huggers vs. oil-guzzlers. The Asthshean solution to the yumen problem is as dark as the human solution to the creechie problem: mass genocide. Oh, spoiler alert! None of the Asthesheans have ever contemplated (or, rather, dreamed of) war before the arrival of their captors, but faced with their situation, they invent it. The Astheshean who brings the concept to his people becomes a kind of translator-god, moving ideas from the Dream world to grisly reality. Since the dream time is real, once evil is introduced to it, evil becomes real. All it takes is someone to move the ideas around.

Unlike in The Lathe Of Heaven, dreams do not hold an extranormal power in this novel — they cannot alter reality in any other capacity than the individual acting on subconscious influences does. According to Ian Watson’s essay in Science Fiction Studies, the dreamers of The Word for World is Forest are basically shamans, “simply in conscious rapport with their dreams; the dream is principally a heuristic tool and—in time of crisis—a decision-making apparatus which permits the total individual to be involved in shaping his destiny.” Dreams generate ideas into conscious being, perhaps by necessity, perhaps by primitive reaction to stress, and the tragic reality in this novel is the dream of death, the nightmare.

The Word for World is Forest was originally a novella published in Harlan Ellison’s Again, Dangerous Visions, an essential anthology. Ellison, a real hard-nosed M.F.-er, insisted on the name: it was originally called “The Little Green Men.”

Supplemental Materials:

Space Canon review of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven
Space Canon review of Again, Dangerous Visions
Some words for Forest: bos, الغابات, անտառ, meşə, гора, 森林, skov, mets, metsä, forêt, δάσος, foraoise, foresta, יער, 숲, saltus, bosque, floresta, лес, skog, Wald.

“What’s the most cyberpunk Photoshop filter?” “Oh, definitely Find Edges.”

[Before I even begin, let me say this.

BUY THIS BOOK

BUY THIS BOOK RIGHT NOW!

Honestly, if you’re not willing to drop $20 on a piece of pure, actual counterculture, get out of here. Semiotext(e) SF is an arcane book! Even in 2010, it feels like a relic from the future history of a parallel world where thieves, gnostic shamans, and cyberpunks were set free to run things. It’s like Again, Dangerous Visions, except instead of Harlan Ellison it’s Robert Anton Wilson (and Rudy Rucker and Hakim Bey/Peter Lamborn Wilson), and instead of “dangerous” it’s “probably against existing obscenity laws” and instead of Way Bwadbuwy and Tewwy Carr it’s William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, and Philip José Farmer at their weirdest. I hold Semiotext(e) SF in my hands and I can’t believe the authorities aren’t knocking down my ceilings and walls, flakes of plaster flying everywhere as the sun spills into my darkened room, to come take it away. Semiotext(e) SF feels the same way about itself. In its own pages, it lovingly refers to itself as a “fucking crazy anthology” exploring the “lunatic fringes” of science fiction.]

When I saw Transformers 2 last summer, I marveled at its visual complexity. The proportions were inconceivable: millions of shards of metal, each individually rendered in gleaming chrome, assembling at impossible speeds into loathsome erectile machine-men, whipping the sands of the actual world around them into fluff. I wondered, if I had trouble even identifying what was happening in front of me, what if some person from the 1800s were teleported into this movie theater? Would they even be able to see anything? Wouldn’t the overwhelming visual stimulus just be an undifferentiated slop to them?

I became somewhat obsessed with the idea of being blinded by modernity. To understand the future, you can’t just be transported into it without reference — it would be meaningless and terrifying. A man born in 1790 is no less neurologically equipped than I am to operate an iPad, but his lack of familiarity with the incremental developments in technology that led to such a thing would render him gaga. Most science fiction doesn’t alienate the hell us because it tends to have an extrapolative quality: we recognize the present day, strung through time to some strange conclusion. Good science fiction takes us far away while still leaving us crumbs of context; bad science fiction is fantasy.

Ergo:

a) I think Semiotext(e) SF would just be carbon-based runes on paper to someone without context for it.
b) This is a cyberpunk anthology, and as such is almost more about the present than the future.

Cyberpunk — which this book is all about — is science fiction that doesn’t point up, up, and away; rather, it’s science fiction that spreads out laterally, in layers of increasing density. The crumbs of context, if you will, are piled up into rotting mounds all around us. This is SF of the visceral now, the encroaching slums, the increasing integration of biology and technology, the degradation of flesh, vacuity, political corruption, the corporatization of the world, social disorder, dark alleyways, new drugs, etc, etc.

The earnest (and archaic) belief that science holds the keys to a rational future — which permeates “Golden Age” science fiction — was shattered by the cyberpunks, because they realized that technology was only getting more populist, more ubiquitous, and more personal. “Science,” in this anthology and in so much cyberpunk writing, doesn’t belong to authorities or professionals; it’s found in secret sex clubs and experimental drugs, abandoned artificial intelligences, personal software and filthy hacker warrens. It may still be the most viable framework for discussing our the dark perimeters of our world — the medium most fit for the moment.

This cybernetic sex joke plays out along the bottom corner of each page, flip book-style.

In other words, as Bruce Sterling wrote in the introduction to his celebrated Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, “for the cyberpunks…technology is visceral. It is not the bottled genie of remote Big Science boffins; it is pervasive, utterly intimate. Not outside us, but next to us. Under our skin; often, inside our minds.”

Hence the Ballard story which details, with clinical precision, Jane Fonda’s boob job. And the stories about de-evolution, Frankenpenises, cyborg sex clubs, televisual grotesque, erotic space colonization, re-programmed minds, brain parasites, and techno-psychedelic scrying, too. Stories with titles like, “I Was a Teenage Genetic Engineer” and “Gnosis Knows Best.” If any one adjective could sum up this mad compendium, it might be “physical,” but the kind of physical that can’t exist without its opposite, transcendence — because that’s what a merger of technology and humanity is essentially about, wires that lead to abstract space. Hardware and software. Wet and dry.

There is a kind of fucked hope in this. Yes, modes of being are being profoundly altered by hacked software and unnatural invasion of machinery into the human body, but at least the individual has control over their subjective reality. It’s liberation through modification of the individual. Mind over matter, right? At least in Semiotext(e) SF, this is cause for joy because it’s truly and totally anti-authoritatian to refuse everything but your own cybernetic pleasure — and to build a literature of the future that is good and blinding for everyone but those living right in the middle of it.

“Science fiction is liberation. Reality in the old Aristotelian sense is a crutch for those who are afraid to walk alone on their own feet, above the Abyss that yawns when we begin to break our mental sets and pause to wonder–really wonder.”

—Robert Anton Wilson, “ever eager for new dimensions of insanity,” from the Introduction

Supplemental Materials:

Full text of J.G. Ballard’s Jane Fonda’s Augmentation Mammoplasty
Full text of J.G. Ballard’s Report on an Unidentified Space Station, a kind of Borgesian Big Dumb Object tale
Rudy Rucker’s envy-inducing recollection of the early days of cyberpunk
Full Archives of Bruce Sterling’s early cyberpunk zine, Cheap Truth
“The Future of Sex,” a 1975 article for Oui by Robert Anton Wilson
Book: Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology
Book: Semiotext(e) U.S.A.

One thing that hasn’t been discussed yet on this blog is the major role that editors have historically played in the sci-fi scene. Since the genre was shaped by decades of magazine publishing, the editors of those magazines — rags like Amazing Stories, Galaxy, Analog Science Fiction, and New Worlds — have largely defined what we consider the “canon.” And, of course, each editor has their own peccadilloes and accompanying infamy. John W. Campbell, considered the most important editor in the history of science fiction, was a hawkish kook convinced that L. Ron Hubbard would win a Nobel Prize for Dianetics, but he also published the first Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon stories. Frederik Pohl’s “Pohl Selections” over at Bantam Books brought the world Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren (I’m still reading it…) and Joanna Russ’ The Female Man, arguably the two most genre-defying science fiction books of all time. And Damon Knight, when he was working as an editor for Chilton Books, tracked down Frank Herbert and convinced him to publish Dune after it had been refused by twenty other publishers. All of these people are as celebrated as the writers they edit, and are usually writers themselves.

Again, Dangerous Visions is book two in a series of essential anthologies edited by Harlan Ellison. Although not as influential as Campbell, Pohl, or Knight, Ellison is an important figure — he penned classic Star Trek episodes, won the Hugo Award eight and a half times, and wrote the original script to I, Robot. He was (and is) something of a pompous dilettante, a Mr. Hollywood type, and a young mover in the scene when the first Dangerous Visions tome was released in 1967. Although Ellison’s sexual politics were murky — he famously grabbed writer Connie Wilson’s breast at a Hugo Awards ceremony and said that feminist writer Joanna Russ looked “infinitely better in a bikini than any of the editors who rejected her novel” — he was nevertheless an early champion of women’s writing during science fiction’s New Wave in the late 60s. And he sealed his title as a legendary editor with the Dangerous Visions books.

“There are no rocket ships in my stories, there are no monsters, it’s not Flash Gordon.”

Apart from essentially being a who’s who of 1960s science fiction (my copy of Again includes stories from James Tiptree Jr., Joanna Russ, Ursula K. LeGuin, Kurt Vonnegut, and Terry Carr, among a few dozen others), the Dangerous Visions books were unique in that almost every story came prefaced with a wordy introduction from Ellison — laying out the author’s biography, how they came to be in the anthology, their “deal,” essentially — and an afterword from the author. For a fan, this is VIP treatment, and with these kinds of contextualizing footnotes, mainstream readers could go straight from “who the hell is James Tiptree Jr.?” to having a solid sense of what they were dealing with. In this particular case, the first publication of “The Milk of Paradise,” a sensuous, boggy story about a man who wistfully half-remembers making love to a grey alien in the mud of a distant planet, one of Tiptree’s best.

Ellison solicited only unpublished works from writers he liked, ensuring that the anthology would never seem second-run, and would, rather, be the place to watch for work by interesting newcomers and old “masters” alike. To boot, he strong-armed them into pushing their boundaries, often sending stories back several times until they were perilous enough to be considered “dangerous.” The result is pretty explosive, even after almost 40 years. In Ellison’s own words, “Look: A,DV is something of a living entity. It is not merely a batch of stories cobbled up by a faceless dude trying to fill in the lag-time between his own books, with another group of faceless dudes submitting at random and hoping to make a buck. It is a great wild bunch of us sitting about and rapping till well into the wee hours.”

Ellison was a unique editor, by all accounts kind of an asshole, and a smashing example of the amazingly weird ghetto that is sci-fi. His breed of bellicose hands-on involvement would scarcely be tolerated in the straight literary establishment (although, to be fair, neither would stories about making love to grey aliens). His fierce muscling of pompous self-involvement — like a four-page introduction to a Kurt Vonnegut story that is essentially a long brag about how well Ellison knows him, or a preface to Ursula K. LeGuin that repeatedly mentions how Ellision and LeGuin won Nebula awards the same year — is anathema to the field of editorship, which is not usually reserved for strong personalities. A brief glance at these videos of Ellison on the interview couch will undoubtedly hammer in this point.

“I don’t take a piss without getting paid for it!”

And yet, science fiction has always been a halfway home for unhinged people, and it’s personalities like Ellison that can compel a disparate community of intellectual misfits to band together. It may come as a shock to people who are accustomed to a soft editorial touch, but the Dangerous Visions books are important largely because Ellison annihilated the divisions between the professional and the personal, reaching into writers’ lives and slapping them on the ass.

NEXT BOOK: FREDERICK POHL AND JACK WILLIAMSON’S THE REEFS OF SPACE