The Lathe Of Heaven: A Novel by
Ursula K. Le Guin
A Dystopian Thriller For A Philosopher
Ursula K. Le Guin is one of science fictions greatest writers. She is also
an acclaimed author of powerful and perceptive nonfiction, fantasy, and
literary fiction. She has received many honors, including six Nebula and
five Hugo Awards, the National Book Award, the Pushcart Prize, the
Newbery, the Pilgrim, the Tiptree, and citations by the American Library
Association. She has written over a dozen highly regarded novels and
story collections. Her SF masterworks are The Left Hand of Darkness
(1969), The Dispossessed (1974), and The Lathe of Heaven (1971).
George Orr has dreams that come true--dreams that change reality. He
dreams that the aunt who is sexually harassing him is killed in a car
crash, and wakes to find that she died in a wreck six weeks ago, in
another part of the country. But a far darker dream drives George into the
care of a psychotherapist--a dream researcher who doesnt share
Georges ambivalence about altering reality. The Lathe of Heaven is set
in the sort of worlds that one would associate with Philip K. Dick, but Ms.

Le Guins treatment of the material, her plot and characterization and
concerns, are more akin to the humanistic, ethically engaged,
psychologically nuanced fiction of Theodore Sturgeon. The Lathe of
Heaven is an insightful and chilling examination of total power, of war and
injustice and other age-old problems, of changing the world, of playing
God. --Cynthia Ward
Personal Review: The Lathe Of Heaven: A Novel by Ursula K. Le
Guin
As with everything she writes, Ursula Le Guin has crafted some rich,
beautiful and somewhat sad (though never depressing) characters and set
them in a world of wildest intrigue. Renowned for her
"social/anthropological experimentation" in her sci-fi novels, Le Guin sets
this novel on earth in Portland, OR, to be exact) and gives us a dystopian
future novel that is so imaginative and fascinating that it feels we are on
another world by the end of it (aliens do, in fact, visit earth briefly). As
wacky as that and the premise of the book--what happens if whatever you
dream becomes reality?--it is not a wacky or funny story, and is all the
more stirring and endearing for it.
Our reluctant protagonist, George Orr, is a quiet, unassuming man who
starts out very much as a victim. A mysterious and terrible past/true reality
is hinted at the very beginning, but we first come to rest in a slightly and
predictably dystopian future where overpopulation, pollution and all the
things that are bound to happen in fifty years' time have happened. George
is caught taking illegal doses of a dream-suppressing drug and sent to see
a state shrink as punishment. In actuality, all George wants is to keep from
dreaming so that he won't end up accidentally changing the world in a
terrible way while sleeping, but his psychiatrist--a robust and arrogant but
unusually well-meaning alpha male type--decides that he wants to use
George's power to change the world for the better--whether George
consents to it or not! As the good doctor's hypnosis-induced dreaming
forces him to dream away world problems (and inadvertently, five-sixths of
the world's population), George must find a way to escape his mad
benefactor and somehow make reality right again.
A fascinating tale told by one of the most brilliant authors in fiction today--
definitely worth reading!
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