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 by other authors such as Isaac Asimov, Le Guin's fictional works set in the Hainish universe explore the idea of human society expanding across the galaxy. Books like "The Dispossessed", "The Left Hand of Darkness", and "The Word for World is Forest" also explore the effects of various social and political systems. Le Guin's later Hainish novels also challenge contemporary ideas about gender, ethnic differences, the value of ownership, and human beings' relationship to the natural world. In comparison to the other worlds of the Hainish universe, the relationship between Athshe and the League of Worlds is portrayed as ambiguous.