"I don't know. Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I know know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass."There was a slight pause, and when Haber answered his tone was no longer genial, reassuring or encouraging. It was quite neutral and verged, just detectably, on contempt."You're of a peculiarly passive outlook for a man brought up in the Judaeo-Christian-Rationalist West. A sort of natural Buddhist. Have you ever studied the Eastern mysticisms, George?" The last question, with its obvious answer, was an open sneer.Many white men have written science fiction that ahistorically imagines a better world - one without war, prejudice, blahblahblah. This book wonders what would happen if a liberal white USian man was empowered with a subtle means of effecting magical changes (of making dreams true), and suggests that all this I-Know-Besting might actually be how we got to where we are. De-colonial, ableism-indicting sci fi, where have you been all my life?The idea that one mind can't fix everything is a difficult one for a fiction author to present, for obvious reasons, but Le Guin does it. Most books, I think, create a we-understand-each-other intimacy between author and reader that usually extends to the protagonist. But George Orr isn't like us. He is so direct that sometimes he speaks in formulae, sharing his thought process. I want to call this mode unpolitician.He never spoke with any bitterness at all, no matter how awful the things he said. Are there really people without resentment, without hate, she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognise evil, and resist evil, yet are utterly unaffected by it?Of course there are. Countless, the living and the dead. Those who have returned in pure compassion to the wheel, those who follow the way that cannot be followed without knowing they follow it, the sharecropper's wife in Alabama and the lama in Tibet and the entomologist in Peru and the millworker in Odessa and the greengrocer in London and the goatherd in Nigeria and the old, old man sharpening a stick by a dry streambed somewhere in Australia, and all the othes. There are enough of them, enough to keep us going. Perhaps.He brushes off the mantle of heroism, not because he is in need of encouragement, but because he knows the quest is vain vanity. The female protagonist, more forceful and vivacious, vanishes when 'the race problem' is 'solved' by making everybody grey. As with the other changes, Le Guin shows us that the removal of inconvenient bodies is always a genocide, even if some sleight of hand makes it appear non violent and 'progressive'. (If you ever find yourself complaining about overpopulation, read this book before you go on.)But now, never to have known a woman with brown skin and wiry black hair cut very short so that the elegant line of the skull showed like the curve of a bronze vase - no, that was wrong. That was intolerable. That every soul on earth should have a body the colour of a battleship!That's why she's not here, he thought. She could not have been born grey. Her colour, her colour of brown, was an essential part of her, not an accident. Her anger, timidity, brashness, gentleness, all were elements of her mixed being, her mixed nature, dark and clear right through, like Baltic amber. She could not exist in the grey people's world.I was rapt from the moment I began reading to the last page, held by a spell of poetry that was unbroken. For me the story's music reached the zenith of beauty when the Alien came into Orr's dream offering help. Sometimes hampered communication manages to be the most eloquent: we have said too much already.
WHY TIME?That's what I was asking Le Guin (or, rather, myself) as I read the first half of this book. You have this guy, George, who is ordinary -- literally median, in fact -- except that when he dreams, reality changes to match his dreams. It does this by changing the past so that whatever new thing he dreams of has always been that way so as far as everyone else is concerned nothing has happened. I read a lot of fantasy and science fiction and am willing to make some pretty damn suspensions to disbelief, but this is just over the limit impossible.It's supposed to be. I'm sure Le Guin could have thought up some more marginally-plausible mechanism by which one individual could unintentionally and uncontrollably alter reality for the entire universe, but then the readers would have spent half the book thinking about how this worked and whether it was internally consistent, and she didn't want that. It's not possible, forget about that part. The point is to create an original arena for raising a number of huge ethical and philosophical questions. What is evil? What makes us human? What is the relationship between memory and personality? Can one justify doing harm for the greater good? Is it possibly for a human being to really understand what the greater good is? Do we have free will? What are the moral and practical obligations of power? How do we balance conflicting moral dilemmas? Could we ever really communicate with aliens?The aliens, by the way, seemed to me suspiciously like a joke about how this isn't really science fiction. This is a novel of ideas, and it doesn't matter how many alien invaders, space battles, time shifts, psychic powers, and futuristic machines you toss in.All that was the part that was interesting to me. As an actual reading experience the book wasn't very enjoyable. The prose was skillful but not pleasurable, and the characters were boring. To a purpose, and I understand why, but still boring. The most interesting was Heather Lelache, and it bothered be how her character was so reduced in later incarnations. Again, I understand why and that Le Guin was raising issues of free will, gender norms, etc, but I think it was heavy-handed. Really a lot of the didactic purpose of the story seemed heavy-handed, and I wish the hard work involved had been me thinking instead of the struggle to persevere in reading it.
What do You think about The Lathe Of Heaven (2003)?
When I first came across this book as a teenager, I think I only really noticed the surface story. George Orr is a man whose dreams, literally, come true; he dreams something, and when he wakes up the world has changed. There's an unscrupulous psychiatrist who wants to exploit George's gift, a love story, some interesting aliens, and a good ending. I really liked it. I've read it three or four times since then, and each time I've appreciated it more. One could imagine a book with a similar plot being written by Philip K. Dick, but, if Dick had done it, it would have had a different focus. Le Guin is also interested in the arbitrary nature of reality, but she is above all a moral writer, and it's easiest to explain why I think The Lathe of Heaven is a great novel if I compare it with some of her other books. Perhaps my favorite moment in her work is the ending of A Wizard of Earthsea. Ged has been relentlessly pursued for years by the deadly Shadow, whose one purpose seems to be to destroy him and everything he cares for. If only he could learn its true name, he would be able to use his magic powers to overcome it. Finally, when he can run no further and is forced to confront it on the open sea, he realizes what he has knows all along. The Shadow's true name is his own name. He, himself, is the dark force that is trying to ruin his life. The struggle with the dark forces inside oneself is one of Le Guin's main preoccupations. This shades over into her fascination with creativity and the creative process, and in particular with the scientist, whose dreams can create reality in the most unexpected manner. Einstein turned a dream of matter, energy, space and time into a reality which soon crystalized as nuclear weapons. (My Japanese friend Yukie, who studied in Hiroshima, met several people who had come directly into contact with Einstein's escaped dream). In The Dispossessed, Shevek is a scientist who manages to control his dream. Le Guin, who clearly understands scientists well, shows just how difficult this is for him. He has to fight his society, and many of the ideas he has been brought up to believe in. As in A Wizard of Earthsea, a lot of the time he also has to fight himself.The Lathe of Heaven, published three years before The Dispossessed, is a kind of rehearsal for the later novel, but with a myth-like treatment more reminiscent of A Wizard of Earthsea. George Orr's supernatural gift hands him a huge responsibility, which he is slow to accept. Like most dreamers, he lets himself be manipulated. And, just as in The Dispossessed, love is the key. There, Takver's unquestioning love for Shevek is what makes it possible for him to unlock the Principle of Simultaneity; here, the simple and touching romance with Heather is what gives George the strength to make the right decision when he reaches the crucial moment. Dreams, truth, responsibility, love. If you're interested in that kind of thing, you should consider reading The Lathe of Heaven. Like all her books, it's beautifully written.
—Manny
Would you like to play God?Would you like to shape the world to your liking? Maybe to rid it of war, overpopulation, hunger, racial prejudice, decease? To make it into your own idea of Heaven?Well, the two main characters of The Lathe of Heaven have different opinions on this subject. George Orr, who possesses a unique ability to change the world by dreaming about, seemingly, the most mundane things, wants this power to be gone, he is sure the events should take their natural course, no matter how dire the consequences are to the humanity. His doctor, William Haber, thinks it is his responsibility to make this world a better place. He is adamant he will achieve his goal of a perfect society! And he will use Orr's ability as a means to his megalomaniac ends. Does it matter that people in his utopia are all of a battleship gray color? That sick people are euthanized? Not to Haber, as long as it is for the common good.The Lathe of Heaven was the first Le Guin's book that tickled my visualization "powers," which are very modest, to put it lightly. My imagination went in overdrive picturing our planet changing - billions of people disappearing, landscapes transforming, climate adjusting - all retroactive results of Orr's unconscious dreaming. This story would make a visually stunning movie a la Inception[image error]
—Tatiana
The Lathe Of Heaven is a taoist parable masquerading as a novella. Through the metaphor of George Orr, a man whose dreams become reality, it examines the consequences of interference and the hubris of believing that we can "improve" the world.I read this book during a flight to Central America, where I was going to spend the summer before my second year of medical school doing HIV/AIDS education. The contrast could not have been more striking: the purpose of my summer and my career was to interfere, to improve, to attempt to mitigate some of the consequences of poverty, ignorance, and social (mis)planning in the US and the world. The Lathe of Heaven made me look long and hard at my motives and, while it did not persuade me that I was wrong in my desire to help, it planted a seed of doubt to counter the inevitable self-righteousness of the volunteer. I think this book should be mandatory reading for everyone who wants to "make the world a better place." That is a noble sentiment, but it's worth a warning that sometimes we may get what we wish for.
—Anne
