Reviews

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

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florisw's review against another edition

5.0

Book in 3 sentences:
• When Man dreams deep dreams, Man’s deep dreams become reality.
• Man’s therapist discovers Man’s ability (gift?), and exploits him in order to play God.
• Turtle-aliens and grey people, but also loving descriptions of Portland, OR and references to real-world events.

General Impressions:Really impressed with how tight and compelling this short-ish story is. As my first Ursula Le Guin book this was a fantastic introduction to her narrative style. Weirdly, the first half of the book was probably the most exhilarating one for me. I don’t know if it was because I was reading it late at night, but Chapter 2 in particular was so irresistible I almost felt hypnotised myself by it (spoiler: that chapter is mainly about hypnosis). Le Guin’s writing is incredibly layered, almost poetic. Some of her descriptions are so thick in this way that I don’t think I fully appreciated them – which I suppose calls for a re-read at some point. And it has plenty of re-reading potential. There are lots of powerful themes in the book: war, overpopulation, addiction, environmental harm, racism. I would be lying if I said it felt as though the book could have been written today in the way it handles these themes – if they were people they’d still be wearing flared trousers. But that doesn’t make these themes any less powerful or pertinent today. If anything, the fact that over half a century has passed since this book came out makes me realise how fundamentally ingrained these topics are in (in my case, Western) society and culture. They simply won’t go away, they just change their form, much like how Le Guin’s fictional world of 2002 changes every time George dreams a deep dream. Despite not being a huge sci-fi buff, I do feel that timeless sci-fi stories are those that are able to incorporate these themes seamlessly into the narrative. This is certainly a feature of The Lathe of Heaven.

Some notable quotations:
• “It was like living in a downpour of warm soup, forever” (Chap. 3). Just one of the many descriptions of future-Portland that seamlessly combine humour, vivid imagery, irony (inhabitants at the time are suffering from malnutrition), and foreshadowing (the emphasis on “forever” contradicting George’s later manipulations of reality, constantly remaking “forever”). Delicious.
• [Describing the effect of the ongoing global war (involving twelve nuclear powers) on Saudi Arabia and Iraq] “the civilian population was living in burrows in the ground while tanks and planes sprayed fire in the air and cholera in the water, and babies crawled out from the burrows blinded by napalm” (Chap. 6). Perhaps not such a subtle parallel drawn to another, very much ongoing conflict c.1971…
• “Who has humanitarian dreams?” (Chap. 6). I like that George tells Dr. Haber this after one of his (more dramatic) dreams. It really highlights the absurdity of the situation – that Dr. Haber is trying to make the world a better place (or at least his approximation of a better place) by getting a man to dream certain things in his office. Or the nice contrast between the intensely private and sedentary act of dreaming, and the decidedly outward and social act of humanitarian work.
• “Miss Crouch, who was feeding her computer” (Chap. 9). This one is probably better with context, because Dr. Haber praises Crouch (his secretary) earlier in the story for her personality, but I love this throwaway 5-word detail on its own as well. It’s funny, it grabs your attention, and although it’s not entirely relatable to the current-day reader (unless you count “feeding” a computer (algorithm) with data), it’s still within today’s range of technological plausibility (which is where lots of good sci-fi wants to be, I imagine).
• “There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear” (Chap. 11). Goddamn is this a fantastic quotation. I don’t read much poetry, and I often find it hard to see what other people see in poetry; the emotions revoked by the words on the page rarely resonate with my own. But this is one of those rare instances. Had I not read it today, Sunday 13th February 2022, it may have passed me by. But right now it’s all I’ve been thinking about this afternoon.