by Anthology
Moreover, maybe that witch Alise at last saw in him a person of talents and importance.
He hoped.
“You’ll go with us?” cried Alise, steepling her hands entreatingly under his nose.
“Let it be,” sighed Chug blackly as his palace crashed.
“Let it be,” cried Alise, whirling into an excited pirouette and fouette, then flinging herself into old Chug’s arms for an ecstatic sashay. “You’ll love your new home, Old Hump. You’ll be warm and cozy, and we’ll take care of you—”
Chug preened a bit, but dour experience flashed signals. “You mean,” he inquired suspiciously, “you’re gonna take me to Flora like some blue-ribbon, prize-winning cat?”
“Halla-hoo!” cried Alise wide-eyed. “We wasn’t thinking of no prize-winning cat! What we had in mind was, more like a house-pet!”
(So that was the way it was gonna be.)
Afterword
Haight-Ashbury, 1966. I visited there for 10 days in November of that year, staying in a semi-hippie type apartment run by my two sons and one other. One son worked, the other went to school at San Francisco State, and the other boy worked at night and tried to sleep during the day. Bodies came and went at all hours. There was a stereo. The cow-moo voice of Bob Dylan blew on the wind; and Joan Baez guitared. After the first shock, I appreciated both of them and do. There was also Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, played quiet. There was food eaten by anybody and provided by anybody. Disarray in kitchen and bedroom was the rule; suddenly someone would clean up the joint. Pot there was not (that I knew). The older son handed me a stack of Marvel comics and remarked, incredibly, that Stan Lee and what he was saying was part of the religion of the Berkeley/Haight-Ashbury scene. I was entranced with The Hulk, with Prince Namor of Atlantis, with The Fantastic Four, with Doctor Strange, the Mighty Thor, and others. I lay on the bed face close to the floor and read and glutted myself in leisure.
On the first day, a Sunday, that I was there, I walked with sons and their friends drinking beer down to the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park where a love-in was in progress. The flower children were beginning now. Girls with painted faces and bare soiled feet. Naked-to-the-waist painted men gyrating in dances to strange Eastern instruments. Paints, brushes, and frames with paper thumb-tacked on them were there for those who wanted to express themselves artistically. A rock band tore the air. Couples danced, roiled, sprawled. Older people, very cubic like me, looked on. Children ran, screamed, danced, sang, automatically knew what their thing was: anybody over ten had to think it out.
On the second day, the older son hesitantly asked if I minded riding pillion on the motorcycle. “It’s the only transportation we’ve got.” I did mind. As the motorcycle started off, me tethered behind, it made a sound which went “ratch-chug.” My son explained, his voice blowin’ back in the wind, “The kind of sound you can expect from our machine-oriented culture.” We chugged on down Cole St., past the psychedelic shops and the little food shops and ice-cream shops run by young people with humble shoulders and Indian head-dress, young and older girls smiling hopefully that love had come to stay, not knowing that the cycle would swing as it does with all things—but that’s another story.
The next day, having plenty of time, and having chased a tomcat off the back porch where it was stealing the little cat’s food, I sat down with a typewriter and some paper and without too much trouble wrote ten silly pages. My older son read the pages, and jolted me with, Did I get my inspiration from the Marvel Comics? “Not that I know of,” I replied. Younger son said, “You going back to writing, Dad? Maybe you should finish this one.” I told him I definitely would finish it . . . someday; that was a promise.
The above indicates how the elements of the story may have fused together. The story is not supposed to have any theme, or any significance, nor does it seem to attempt to solve any social problems. I tried not to make it timely.
The story was finished up, and rewritten a bit for Again, Dangerous Visions, but it was not the story I started to write. That story dealt with a priest who scoffed at the idea of light-speed being the limiting velocity in our universe, and with God’s help got to Alpha Centauri in no time at all. The difficulties in this theme became enormous, and I turned to the almost forgotten ten pages turned out in a lost San Francisco world. To Keith and Jeff, here ‘tis.
THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST
Ursula K. Le Guin
Introduction
The problem isn’t what to say about the incredible Ursula Le Guin, it’s where to start.
Should I, he said, begin with the observation that she is without question the most elegant writer in the sf world? Perhaps. If for no other reason, then surely to expand on the proposition that on certain people in this life a gift of grace and style is bestowed that makes all the rest of us look like garden slugs. Being in Ursula’s company for any extended period is an enriching experience, but one gets the impression that oneself and everyone else in the room are on the grace level of a paraplegic’s basketball team being trained by Fred Astaire.
She is witty, strong, emphatic and empathic, wise, knowledgeable, easygoing and electric, seraphic, gracious, sanguine and sane. Without sacrificing the finest scintilla of femininity she dominates a group with her not inconsiderable strengths as an individual; it is Ursula Le Guin, as a model, I’m sure, women’s liberationists are most striving to emulate. In short, she’s dynamite.
She also smokes a pipe . . . in private.
She also writes one helluva stick.
Ursula won a Nebula and Hugo in 1970 for her novel The Left Hand of Darkness. You’ve read it, of course, so there’s no need to dwell on its level of excellence. Yet it can truly be said, no award in that category in recent years has done the Nebula—or Hugo—more credit.
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California in 1929; daughter of anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber and Theodora K. Kroeber, author of Ishi in Two Worlds, The Inland Whale, and several other tomes of an equally awe-inspiring nature. (Interestingly enough, I find my own listing in Contemporary Authors, volumes 5–8, along with Ursula’s mother’s listing. But no Ursula. Would someone kindly point out their oversight to them.)
Ursula grew up in Berkeley and in the Napa Valley. She received her B.A. from Radcliffe and her Masters from Columbia, in French and Italian Renaissance literature.
She met and married Charles A. Le Guin (pronounced Luh Gwinn) while they were both on Fulbrights in France. He is now a Professor of French History at Portland State College, Oregon; they have lived in Portland for ten years. They have three children: Elisabeth, Caroline, Theodore.
In 1968–69, Ursula and her husband went on sabbatical to England; they returned in July of 1969, to Portland, but out of the journey came some marvelous letters, portions of which I include here as examples of purest Ursula.
Here’s an example:
“You know London buses have 2 storeys with a sort of half-circular staircase, smoking allowed on the top deck—in winter, between Woodbines & Bronchitis, it’s like an Advanced T.B. Ward crossed with a Sauna Bath on fire, all lurching through dark Dickensian alleys jammed with Minicars and Miniskirts—Well, you never get up the stairs before the bus plunges off again, so the conductor/tress shouts, ‘Eol pridi daeneow!’ or ‘Eoldon toit luv!’—or, if West Indian, sings out in the picturesque native dialect (English), ‘Hold on pretty tight now!’ And if you don’t, you’ve had it. There’s no door.”
Or how about this summation of the English encounter: “We were on sabbatical, except the kids, who went to the local school and got a splendid education and a Cockney accent. We lived in a drab old North London borough called Islington, long rows of high houses like dirty toffees all stuck together staring at the row of dirty toffees opposite. By the time we left, we found these streets very beautiful, and inhaled the exhaust gases of a double-decker red London bus deeply, like sea air. This was essentially a result of the kindliness of the English (including Pakistani Indian Greek Italian, etc.) among whom
we lived in Islington. It was the Spirit we were breathing in. London air causes asthma in many, but it is worth it. The English are slightly more civilized than anyone else has yet been. Also England is a good country for introverts; they have a place in society for the introvert, which the United States has not. In fact there is a place in London for everything; you can find what you want there, from organized diabolical perversity à la Baron Charlus, to the kind of lollipops that change color as you proceed inwards. I mean it has everything. But the best thing, the finest thing, is the kindliness.”
Kindliness is something of a central concern with Ursula Le Guin, and as soon as I tend to her bibliography here, I’ll tell you of a gratuitous kindness she did me which sums up for me the wonder of Le Guin.
Apart from The Left Hand of Darkness and the brilliant Playboy story, “Nine Lives,” Ursula Le Guin has written the following novels (all available in Ace paperback editions): Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusions and A Wizard of Earthsea. These in addition to poems in various of the “little” magazines and short stories in magazines and collections like QUARK and ORBIT. Her latest titles are The Tombs of Atuan (Atheneum) and The Lathe of Heaven (Scribner’s). That taken care of, let me tell you an Ursulincident that made me forever her slave.
In 1970, in Berkeley, the Science Fiction Writers of America saw fit to award both Ursula and myself Nebula awards, which I’ve mentioned before (not only to assert her gloriousness, but to balm my own ego-needs as well). One splendid evening during that Nebula weekend was spent in the company of Ursula, sf-writer Norman Spinrad, Ms. Terry Champagne (author of the world’s foremost cockroach horror sf story), the ever-popular Ms. Louise Farr, and a couple that memory vaguely reminds me were Greg Benford and his lovely wife. We went to an Afghanistani restaurant where, to my again flawed memory, I did not cause a scene, thereby making it an historic occasion. And afterward, we went up into the Berkeley hills to the magnificent all-wood home of Ursula’s mother. Seeing the latter, it is easy to understand where the former obtained her elegance and style. It was one of the most pleasant evenings I’ve ever spent, rife with bon mots and lucid conversation, but I had the undercurrent feeling (totally self-generated, I assure you) that I was a guttersnipe among royalty. Nothing in the manner of Ursula or her family contributed to forming that little nubbin of self-flagellation . . . it was just one of the many niggling little doubts about personal worthiness that all of us have when we are in the company of the very talented, the very beautiful, the very rich or the very landed gentry. It interfered in no way with my enjoyment of the evening.
The next night, when the Nebulas were awarded, a ceremony of singular traumatic content, Ursula Le Guin proved by one single gesture how senseless it is for even the most secure of us to harbor such lack of self-worth.
Among the nominees sitting in that small dining room at the Claremont Hotel that night, were Norman Spinrad (who was up against Ursula with his novel Bug Jack Barron), Fritz Leiber (who was vying with me for the novella Nebula with his “Ship of Shadows”), Chip Delany, Greg Benford and Norman again, all up against Ursula’s “Nine Lives” for the novelette award, and Larry Niven (whose short story “Not Long Before the End” was up against my “Shattered Like A Glass Goblin”). It was a tense situation. When Ursula’s The Left Hand of Darkness beat out Zelazny, Brunner, Silverberg, Vonnegut and Spinrad . . . Norman went into a funk that spread its miasmic pall throughout the time-zone. When I copped mine, a very lovely lady sitting with Fritz Leiber burst into tears and Karen Anderson, author and wife of Poul Anderson, looked as though she wanted to cut my throat. When Samuel R. Delany took the novelette Nebula, Greg and Ursula were a study in conflicting emotions, and Norman went under the table. Thank God Silverberg grabbed the short story award, because Larry Niven would have cheerfully knifed me, had I won two that night. Those of us who were there—Ursula, Chip and myself—(Silverberg accepted his award at the East Coast banquet in New York, safe from his competition) slunk up and took our trophies with a few mumbled, embarrassed words, and crawled away again. All in all, it was horrendous. Never have I felt so guilty winning an award.
Shortly thereafter, when the crowd broke up into small groups, I detached myself from the well-wishers to go over and congratulate Ursula on winning what was surely the first of many awards to come. She was sitting at a table with a clot of people standing around. Her Nebula was on the table. Mine was in my arms. Hers was prettier than mine. I switched them. (Since our names and the stories we’d written to win the trophies were engraved on the plinth of each, it was clearly a gag of the moment.) I waited for that moment when Ursula would realize she had my Nebula and I had hers, and it would be my way of saying good-for-you. But that moment never came.
One of the ladies standing there, a lady with a penchant for hysteria, began shrieking at the top of her lungs, “Ursula! Ursula! He stole your Nebula! He stole your Nebula, Ursula, Ursula!!!” and she began weeping convulsively.
I panicked and quickly switched them back as Ursula, suddenly jerked into a wild scene, tried to get her bearings to establish what was happening.
“Hey, take it easy, it was only a joke,” I said to the trembling lady, “they’re both Nebulas, you know.”
To which the lady responded, “Yes, but hers is for a novel, not a story.” Since I have never won an award for a novel—and the lady knew it—that was what we of the jet set call a consummate downer. It dropped a shroud over the joy of the evening, such as it was, and added to Fritz Leiber’s companion’s tears, it made me feel like a pound and a half of mandrill shit.
I started to lurch away, when I felt a hand on my arm. It was Ursula. I looked back down at her and she was staring at me with an expression that said I understand, forget it, it doesn’t matter what she says, all’s right with the world.
It instantly brought me up like the Goodyear blimp. And it saved the evening for me.
One gesture of kindliness, that tells more about Ursula K. Le Guin than all the biographies anyone could write.
And as a final note, check the placement of her very long and very fine novella in these pages. It is the second actual story in the book (Heidenry’s is, as stated, a keynote entry). The wise editor, I was informed early in my career as a compiler of anthologies, puts his very strongest stuff at the beginning and the end of the book. I started off with the Rocklynne because of its strength and because of his personal meaning for the field. And since I had three extra-long pieces for inclusion here, one to start, one in the middle, and one to close, I wanted to make it a story that would zonk the readership.
Her wonderfulness aside, it am the words of Ursula Le Guin what wins the heart and memory, and the hot spot in this book.
The Word for World is Forest
1.
Two pieces of yesterday were in Captain Davidson’s mind when he woke, and he lay looking at them in the darkness for a while. One up: the new shipload of women had arrived. Believe it or not. They were here, in Centralville, twenty-seven lightyears from Earth by NAFAL and four hours from Smith Camp by hopper, the second batch of breeding females for the New Tahiti Colony, all sound and clean, 212 head of prime human stock. Or prime enough, anyhow. One down: the report from Dump Island of crop failures, massive erosion, a wipe-out. The line of 212 buxom beddable breasty little figures faded from Davidson’s mind as he saw rain pouring down onto ploughed dirt, churning it to mud, thinning the mud to a red broth that ran down rocks into the rainbeaten sea. The erosion had begun before he left Dump Island to run Smith Camp, and being gifted with an exceptional visual memory, the kind they called eidetic, he could recall it now all too clearly. It looked like that bigdome Kees was right and you had to leave a lot of trees standing where you planned to put farms. But he still couldn’t see why a soybean farm needed to waste a lot of space on trees if the land was managed really scientifically. It wasn’t like that in Ohio; if you wanted corn you grew corn, and no space wasted on trees and stuff. But then Earth was a tamed planet and N
ew Tahiti wasn’t. That’s what he was here for: to tame it. If Dump Island was just rocks and gullies now, then scratch it; start over on a new island and do better. Can’t keep us down, we’re Men. You’ll learn what that means pretty soon, you godforsaken damn planet, Davidson thought, and he grinned a little in the darkness of the hut, for he liked challenges. Thinking Men, he thought Women, and again the line of little figures began to sway through his mind, smiling, jiggling.
“Ben!” he roared, sitting up and swinging his bare feet onto the bare floor. “Hot water get-ready, hurry-up-quick!” The roar woke him satisfyingly. He stretched and scratched his chest and pulled on his shorts and strode out of the hut into the sunlit clearing all in one easy series of motions. A big, hard-muscled man, he enjoyed using his well-trained body. Ben, his creechie, had the water ready and steaming over the fire, as usual, and was squatting staring at nothing, as usual. Creechies never slept, they just sat and stared. “Breakfast. Hurry-up-quick!” Davidson said, picking up his razor from the rough board table where the creechie had laid it out ready with a towel and a propped-up mirror.
There was a lot to be done today, since he’d decided, that last minute before getting up, to fly down to Central and see the new women for himself. They wouldn’t last long, 212 among over two thousand men, and like the first batch probably most of them were Colony Brides, and only twenty or thirty had come as Recreation Staff; but those babies were real good greedy girls and he intended to be first in line with at least one of them this time. He grinned on the left, the right cheek remaining stiff to the whining razor.
The old creechie was moseying round taking an hour to bring his breakfast from the cookhouse. “Hurry-up-quick!” Davidson yelled, and Ben pushed his boneless saunter into a walk. Ben was about a meter high and his back fur was more white than green; he was old, and dumb even for a creechie, but Davidson knew how to handle him. A lot of men couldn’t handle creechies worth a damn, but Davidson had never had trouble with them; he could tame any of them, if it was worth the effort. It wasn’t, though. 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. And he always got it.
