The Lathe of Heaven

The Lathe of Heaven
Ursula K. Le Guin

I really wanted to like this book better than I did. I developed somewhat of a crush on James Triptree Jr./Alice Sheldon after reading her biography and the story collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. And it is through Triptree/Sheldon that I came to read Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven.

I don’t ordinarily read science fiction, so maybe it’s just that I don’t have enough experience in the genre to appreciate it, but it seemed, well, even for 1971, a bit stale. George Orr (even I have read enough science fiction to get this connection) is a man whose dreams have the ability to change reality. Not just the present reality, but everyone’s memory of the past as well. The tricky things about dreams though, is that they are not controlled by your conscious mind, but rather it’s drunken, unpredictable, oh-no-he-didn’t, close cousin, the subconscious. George becomes troubled by the effects of his dreams and after overdosing on a combination of uppers and downers, finds himself in the office of Dr. Haber, under Voluntary Therapeutic Treatment.

Dr. Haber is able to witness the changing of reality as he hooks George up to his “baby”-- a dream augmentor that gives Dr. Haber the ability to induce dream sleep, or d-state, as it is called,. During subsequent sessions Dr. Haber attempts to “better” the world by suggesting ideas to George while he is under hypnosis and hooked up to the augmentor. George tends to dream big. He isn’t dreaming that he forgot his pants and is waiting for the bus, or registered for a class that he never knew about until finals. Instead, it is large scale changes – aliens, volcanoes and environmental catastrophes. As George explains to Dr. Haber:

“I guess I can’t, or my subconscious can’t, even imagine a warless world. The best it can do is substitute one kind of war for another. You said, no killing of humans by other humans. So I dreamed up the Aliens. Your own ideas are sane and rational, but this is my unconscious you’re trying to use, not my rational mind. …You’re trying to reach progressive, humanitarian goals with a toll that isn’t suited to the job. Who has humanitarian dreams?”

Realizing what the good bad doctor is up to, George seeks the counsel of a lawyer, Heather LaLeche, a female character that never seems to come to life. The most relevant trait she seems to have, is that she has a purse with a large brass snap that she snaps loudly. And if you think dating is difficult in the ordinary world, just try it when you have multiple versions of your past.

I found George himself not to be very likeable. I think he is supposed to be the embodiment of zen-ness , an example of embracing what is. He lectures Haber on how he shouldn’t try and change things, that to do so is wrong. But, of course, he himself is actually trying to change how things are, i.e. the “effective” dreaming.

“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 don’t 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 cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.”

“This was the way he had to go; he had no choice. He had never had any choice. He was only a dreamer.”


In Lathe, the world seems to be divided not into black licorice lovers and black licorice haters, as I would divide up the world, but into dreamers and changers. It’s clear what happens when a dreamer and a changer meet up, the changer becomes frustrated because you can only change something that has a solid definition of what it is. A dreamer never “is” something. And in a way, this book is like that, content to drift, to be, without fulling pulling in the reader.