OMAC YOUR ENTHUSIASM (4)
By:
April 14, 2026
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… Seventies (1974–83) sci-fi novels and comics! Series edited by Josh Glenn.
THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST | URSULA K. LE GUIN | 1972
On August 29, 1911, a middle-aged man emerged from wildfire-ravaged scrub on the outskirts of Oroville, California. Starving and empty-handed, he was identified as a native, and his case soon caught the public imagination: here, it was said, was the last “wild indian.” He caught the attention, too, of anthropologists at the University of California — in particular, that of Alfred J. Kroeber, one of the foremost American ethnologists of the twentieth century. Kroeber and his colleagues pieced together the man’s tragic story: born into a band of Yahi, Yana and people from other tribes thrown together by settler savagery, Ishi was a refugee from the start, his people under constant threat of massacre. Three years before he turned up in Oroville, the man and his family had been ambushed by a team of surveyors who ransacked their camp and stole the last of their material possessions. His family members had died soon after, leaving him alone and on the run.
Kroeber took primary responsibility for the man, whom he dubbed “Ishi,” lodging him for the next five years in his museum in San Francisco. Ishi served as a janitor there, teaching Kroeber and his colleagues many things, from making fire with a drill to flint-knapping with specialized tools. Using wax cylinders, each of which could hold roughly four minutes of audio at the time, Kroeber recorded nearly six hours of Ishi singing and telling stories.
Born in 1929, Kroeber’s daughter, Ursula, never knew Ishi, who died of tuberculosis in 1916 while Kroeber was away in New York City. But her father’s science and the fraught, fascinating ghost of Ishi haunts her work, nowhere more strongly than in her book The Word for World is Forest. A short novel in the Hainish series, it recounts an indigenous uprising on Athshe, a forest planet, where earthly humans (Terrans) have brought a nasty, brutish colonization. Ursula often said that the novel, published in 1972, was intended as a polemic against the Vietnam War. But this is also the era of Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970) and a militant and revitalized movement for Native American rights and dignity. And in Selver, the hero of Ursula’s novel, there is an echo of Ishi as well. His band broken, his wife raped and killed by a Terran invader, Selver becomes a refugee who takes up work as a kind of dogsbody to an anthropologist, Raj Lyubov. In Lyubov’s company, he begins to understand his culture as distinct. His people and their relationship with the forest no longer comprise the entirety of things, but are merely one world among many, a “culture” to be explained, justified, and above all defended from their invaders. Even his name, “Selver,” a moniker forced upon him by Terrans in place of the unpronounceable music of his Athsean name, seems a semantic echo of “Ishi,” a word for “man” in the Yahi language of northern California.
Selver leads a revolt that drives the Terrans from his planet. He and his people learn war in the process, and come to see themselves as selves, separate and seeking, something other and less than entangled embodiments of their forest world. Their loss mirrors Ishi’s, and perhaps our own.
OMAC YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Mark Kingwell on RIDDLEY WALKER | Carlo Rotella on THE FACE | Sara Ryan on DREAMSNAKE | Matthew Battles on THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST | Ramona Lyons on HIGH-RISE | Adam McGovern on SHADRACH IN THE FURNACE | Deb Chachra on HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY | Tom Nealon on DHALGREN | Michael Grasso on FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID | Stephanie Burt on BRIGHTNESS FALLS FROM THE AIR | Nikhil Singh on SABRE | Gordon Dahlquist on VALIS | Miranda Mellis on THE DISPOSSESSED | Marc Weidenbaum on SOFTWARE | Peggy Nelson on THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER | Josh Glenn on ENGINE SUMMER | Mimi Lipson on A SCANNER DARKLY | Douglas Wolk on THRILLER | David Hirmes on ARZACH | Anthony Miller on SHOCKWAVE RIDER | Annie Nocenti on JIMBO | Seth on MR. MACHINE | Alex Brook Lynn on JUDGE DREDD | Joe Alterio on THE INCAL | Jason Grote on JOSIE AND THE ELEVATOR.
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