Deplorable Word word itself, and had vowed that none of them, nor their descendants, would seek to discover it. Jadis said she had "learned it in a secret place and paid a terrible price to learn it". The book does not say what that price was, or give further details on the Deplorable Word. Lewis does not explicitly link the Deplorable Word to any specific weapon of mass destruction, but he alludes to the power of humanity to destroy life. Writing in 1955 in the midst of the Cold War, Lewis has the lion Aslan say to the central characters from the
The Word for World Is Forest of "The Word for World is Forest". Specific similarities include the notion that the Earth's resources have been used up, the extraction of resources in an exploitative manner from another planet, a native population on that planet which lives in close harmony with their world, and a rebellion by those natives against the exploitative human colonizers. A key difference lies in the roles of the "benevolent" humans in both works: Raj Lyubov in "The Word for World is Forest", Jake Sully and the human scientists in "Avatar". While Lyubov made an impression as a "sensible" human and did help mediate