In such an ecosystem, the only agent that could have attacked Osden is another human, and one of the scientists finally admits that he mistook the psychological effect of the forest for Osden’s influence and wanted to rid the mission of his interference. This illustration originally prompted a short story by science-fiction writer Bob Shaw.
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Hardy, Fairyland of Fungi from the illustration series “Galactic Tours,” 1981. Awareness of being, without object or subject. Nothing comprehensible to an animal mind. Response to sun, to light, to water, and chemicals in the earth around the roots. It is, in a sense, the connection: the connectedness.’” Osden sums up his experience of this utterly alien form of intelligence by characterizing it as “‘sentience without senses. One of them argues, “‘sentience or intelligence isn’t a thing, you can’t find it in, or analyze it out from, the cells of a brain. But others observe that all the plants are linked by an intricate root system and a network of epiphytes so as to create what might be a far-reaching web of connections.
I couldn’t stop sending the fear back, and it kept growing, and I couldn’t move, I couldn’t get away.’” 2 Several of the scientists contradict him by pointing out that the tree-like plants have no nervous system that would enable them to react to their surroundings in such a way. As if they’d finally known I was there, lying on them there, under them, among them, the thing they feared, and yet part of their fear itself. Below me in the ground, down under the ground … I felt the fear. When they discuss their experiences as Osden regains consciousness, it becomes clear that the plant life in the forest has some kind of sentience that he was able to identify mostly by its fear: “‘I suppose I could feel the roots.
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As they pick him up, they are seized by an overwhelming and irrational fear that they hardly know how to control. Lingering apprehension erupts into crisis when Osden misses his radio transmissions, and is found bleeding and unconscious on the forest soil by two scientists who go out to search for him. To minimize the disruptive effects of this condition, he moves away from the team to take on the biological exploration of a nearby forest.īut the tension that Osden’s presence had caused is soon replaced by a vague feeling of unease that most members of the group experience in and around this forest. 1 Since most of his colleagues approach him with suspicion or latent hostility, he cannot help but respond with scorn and hatred, which ends up estranging even the most patient and compassionate among them. One of the scientists, Osden, proves particularly problematic, as his “wide-range bioempathic receptivity,” a psychological condition that enables him to “share lust with a white rat, pain with a squashed cockroach, phototropy with a moth,” also leads him blindly to reflect back any human emotions he senses in his surroundings. Their scientific study of this world is from the beginning impaired by the peculiarities of their life as a group: since only psychologically or socially alienated individuals volunteer for a mission that will take them 500 years into the future (returning to Earth will take another 250), conflicts continuously erupt between the team members. When a team of scientific explorers arrives on the planet called only World 4470, after a journey that has taken just a few hours in their personal time but 250 years in Earth time, they find all its continents inhabited exclusively by plants, from grass-like to tree-like species. Le Guin describes the encounter of a group of humans with an ecosystem that cannot be understood as encompassing anything less than an entire planet. In her short story “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow,” science fiction novelist Ursula K.
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