The Lathe of Heaven
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Publisher: Scribner
Date of Publication: January 1971
There’s nothing like waking abruptly from the middle of a dream, feeling on the verge of falling out of bed, to make you question reality. My body is tingling and strangely foreign, while my mind tells me that I have gone nowhere since I fell asleep. I feel entirely awake even as my frightful, still imagining subconscious tries to tell me that nothing I experience is real. This is the world in The Lathe of Heaven—abuzz, disorienting, and torn between the governance of the mind and an anarchy of the senses. It is terrifyingly brilliant and disorientingly familiar.
George Orr is a man without much substance or significance. Yet he has discovered that he has the power of affective dreaming. He can literally change the world. Distraught at his capability, he consults a psychiatrist, Dr. Haber, who sees and seizes an opportunity to improve the world. As Orr’s control over his power decreases, he becomes increasingly desperate to keep the world as it as and reign in his mind.
In the case of George Orr, dreaming the world anew means that he is the only one who knows what was lost and what was gained in the change. It is an incredibly isolating premise. Not just the abstract world at large, but the people around him change, the place where he earns his keep changes all the time, and even his home can change in one night between sleeping and waking. Each time Orr has an affecting dream, he endures all the grief, fear, hope, and resignation that someone else might endure over the course of several years of change and loss. Le Guin does a beautiful job of conveying the toll of constant, isolating loss and novelty. Orr has no choice about whether he stays the same. He is both more deeply connected to his world and more deeply disconnected from it than anyone around him. His sanity is admirable, his desire to eliminate his power is humbling, and his ironic helplessness is pitiable. Because of all that Orr is and all that he cannot be, he is the perfect encapsulation of how awful it can be to be ordinary.
This story amplifies many familiar doubts. George Orr has the hypothetical power to create an ideal world, yet no actual control over his capability to do so. His memories of each life “lived” blur together. He loves people who in some of his worlds never lived. In The Lathe of Heaven, idealism is of tenuous value, loving someone may become a waste, and while the mind is the only real source of truth, it can reinvent the truth at any time. Orr is a character that readers can empathize and connect with, yet not want to become. That is what makes him so human, and that is part of what makes the story so powerful.
Le Guin’s writing is as magnificent as the character and story she tells. Her character descriptions are consistent without becoming repetitive. She shies away from excessive worldbuilding, as Orr’s world is always changing, but there is enough to give shape and flavor to each iteration. The details she does share evoke a place both crowded and lonely, aptly chosen for a protagonist experiencing Orr’s cruel capability. Her dialogue feels straight out of the minds of her characters, unfiltered and structured hastily as it leaves their mouths. Her diction aids a mounting sense of disturbance and disorientation. I finished Le Guin’s book and felt as though I was situated in the wrong world, that my mind should be able to position me within the covers I had just closed. Upon finishing Le Guin’s book, I had the sense that somehow, her worlds were more real than mine, even as they perpetually unmade themselves.
This book is for the people that live in their heads and question the workings of their world and the limits of perception. It is for the people who wish they could be something other than themselves. It does what the best science fiction does: amplifies and extrapolates the strange, uncomfortable aspects of the world we think we know.
