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 "The Dispossessed", which made "The Word for World is Forest" less complex than those other works. Charlotte Spivack stated that although the novel was "deftly written and imaginatively conceived", its "polemic" style made it a lesser literary achievement than many of Le Guin's other works. She says that unlike many other characters that Le Guin has created, such as George Orr and Dr. Haber in "The Lathe of Heaven", several characters in "The Word for World is Forest", such as Davidson, exist only as one-dimensional stereotypes. She described the style of the novel as "moving and hard-hitting", but said that