This book actually won a Hugo Award for Best Novella and is one of Le Guin's most celebrated works. It's supposed to have one of those aliens that truly seem alien, and like every Le Guin book I've read, it's well written--although unlike others by her I've read incredibly preachy with anvils noisily clanging from the beginning. I couldn't stand more than 50 pages of it.
If you think Greenpeace is too moderate, if you could spike trees and rub your hands with glee at the thought of a lumberjack being mutilated, than hey, this book is for you. Although really, I'm sorry, harvesting lumber to ship dozens of light years? And it just so happens many of those trees are terrestrial species? Please.
Maybe, just maybe, if Captain Don Davidson whose perspective we open with weren't such a caricature, if he wasn't such a repellant, twirl-the-mustache villain from the very first pages, I could have hung on until what was good in the book took hold. As it was, I felt if I'm was going to experience a tale of how cutting down trees is evil, where the noble, peaceful indigenous people fight back against the rapacious Yumens, well, I'll go watch Avatar again--at least it's pretty.
