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 the Vietnam War, but was living in London when she wrote the novel, cut off from the anti-war movement she had been a part of in Oregon. Written in these circumstances, "The Word for World is Forest" became what Le Guin called a "preachment". She stated that writing the book was like "taking dictation from a boss with ulcers". She said that she had wanted to write about forests and dreaming, but that the "boss" had made her write instead about ecological destruction. Charlotte Spivack stated that the book was an "angry work", that ended on a note of