Fabulous paperback cover: "The Word for World is Forest"

We don't get paperback covers like this much anymore! Search through the Papergreat archives for more artwork by Richard M. Powers. ... Also, apologies if some of the excerpts and review quotes are leaning into my depression regarding the state of everything.

• Title: The Word for World is Forest
• Additional cover text: "The mind-stunning science fiction masterpiece"
• Author: Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018)
• Cover illustration: Richard M. Powers (1921-1996), though he is not credited anywhere in the book
• Publisher: Berkley Medallion
• Year of this edition: December 1976 (fifth printing)
• Original publication date: 1972
• Pages: 169
• Format: Paperback
• Cover price: $1.75 (in very small sideways type)
• Back cover excerpt: "The planet Athshe was a paradise whose people were blessed with a mystical awareness of existence. Then the conquerors arrived and began to rape, enslave and kill humans without a flicker of humanity. The Athsheans were unskilled in the ways of war, and without weapons. But the gentle tribesmen possessed strange powers over their dreams. And the alien conquerors had taught them how to hate..."
• Dedication: "FOR JEAN Who Went Ahead"
• Excerpt #1: It was unbelievable. They'd all gone insane. This damned alien world had sent them all right round the bend, into byebye dreamland, along with the creechies.
• Excerpt #2: With a promise of peace they would withdraw all their outposts and live in one area, the region they had forested in Middle Sornol: about 1700 square miles of rolling land, well watered.
• Excerpt #3: "When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses."
• Rating on Amazon: 4.5 stars (out of 5). 
• Amazon review excerpt: In 2024, Royce wrote: "If we find life on other worlds, we will inevitably enslave its inhabitants, kill its inhabitants, or if they are superior, go to war with them. It’s just who we are. I hope we never find life elsewhere because I know us and it will end badly."
• Rating on Goodreads: 4.06 stars (out of 5). 
• Goodreads review excerpt: In 2020, Sean Barrs wrote: "I argue that it is an extremely important work of science-fiction because we could learn from it as a society. And this is why art is so radically essential. We have a distant future, and a distant alien world, we are dealing with intergalactic politics and racism across humanoid species, but the allegory is not too far from today. And that's truly terrifying."
• Blunt thoughts from Lawrence Burton, author of Crappy 1970s Paperbacks with Airbrushed Spacecraft on the Covers: "I realise that James Cameron's Avatar borrows from a great variety of sources — Edgar Rice Burroughs, Dances with Wolves, and the Smurfs to name but three — but it really feels like a massive [bleeping] chunk of it came from this novella, albeit with a few other bits bolted on so as to save the effects guy being stood around all day twiddling his thumbs and looking bored."

Graffiti on a secluded stairway in Catalina, Arizona

To change world takes one random act of kindness

Be kind!

Postcard from my great-grandfather to my grandmother*

*I think

This postcard was mailed from Hotel Ruiz Galindo in Fortín de las Flores, Veracruz, Mexico, to Bushnell General Hospital in Brigham City, Utah, sometime in the early to mid 1940s. (The six-cent Mexican stamp used was issued in 1940.)

The card was mailed to Mrs. J.G. Ingham. That would be my grandmother, Helen Chandler Adams Ingham (1919-2003), who worked at the hospital during World War II. She was married at the time to Jack G. Ingham. 

I'm pretty sure that the short note ("This is a gorgeous place. Expect to return home shortly.") was written by my great-grandfather, Howard Horsey Adams (1892-1985), who signed as "Poppa." But I'm not 100% on that. 

One of these days I need to see what I can find out about Jack Ingham. He and my grandmother had divorced by the early 1950s. I have a fair number of photos of him, but not much in the way of biographical information, and he was never discussed much when I was a child.