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 balance with their ecosystem. Reviewer Ian Watson states that the Athshean forest itself is a metaphor for consciousness in the novel. The Terrans, distanced from their own tangled subconscious, are afraid of the forest, and seek to tear it down. The Athsheans, in contrast, are integrated with it at a subconscious level. The entire forest is also seen as a collective Athshean consciousness. Although the forest in "The Word for World is Forest" is not actually sentient, Le Guin explores the idea of a sentient forest further in the short story "Vaster than Empires and More Slow", which shares many