The Luau served a first-rate venison steak. What would they say on old Earth if they saw one man eating a kilogram of meat at one meal? Poor damn soybeansuckers!

Hoorah US military (but in SPACE) does a colonialism, oppressing and enslaving the sentient beings on a planet to extract the valuable resources from the land, wood. The oppressed people learn about the concept of murder from the Humans and use it to fight back.

Seems like Ursula K. Le Guin is subverting the old school military science fiction trope of humans going around killing “aliens” with the humans doing the killing framed as the good guys who we’re supposed to be rooting for. Maybe colonialism is bad?

soybeansuckers now that’s good shit.

It’s interesting to read this just after reading Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus. They were both published in 1972, they’ve got a lot of themes in common and they were both nominated for Hugo Award for best novella (with Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest winning the award).

There’s no denying that only Gene Wolfe could have written a masterpiece like The Book of the New Sun. But Le Guin’s economy of words, using few words to say a lot, is her biggest strength and makes reading her books (barring The Farthest Shore of course) a joy and makes the underlying ideas easier to bring to the surface.

Whereas Wolfe goes out of his way to hide hidden his ideas all throughout his texts, which is interesting in its own way, but sometimes his commitment to obscuring everything in a layer of mystery and complexity can get in the way of telling a compelling story in a compelling way (refer to the Fifth Head of Cerberus).