Book Review: The Lathe of Heaven

Ursula K. Le Guin
1971
Awards: Locus
Nominations: Nebula, Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

For one of the later editions of her novel The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote a beautiful essay about how science fiction is powerful because it allows us to perform thought experiments—following exploratory premises to their ultimate end to see how they might play out.

She is brilliant at this herself, coming up with wild kernels of ideas and packing interesting characters and plots around them so she can explore their full consequences. She takes your mind places you never could go in reality—and, in doing so, reveals much about our real life on Earth.

The Lathe of Heaven is a perfect example of this. And it is a relatively short novel, but it plunges you right into the story and moves along at a fast clip, with every chapter advancing the central plot one more major degree until the final resolution.

George Orr, our main character, is a sensitive man by nature. And he carries a terrible burden: he knows that his dreams change waking reality. For everyone.

When Orr dreams, his dreams change the past. So everyone except him knows only the new, altered reality. Orr is the only one who carries both the memories of the original, defunct reality and the new, changed reality in his head simultaneously.

And Orr’s is a world that would be tempting to try to change. In perhaps one of the first ever appearances of climate change in a work of fiction, Orr’s Earth of the near future is one wracked by global warming and crowded with too many billions of people. Polar ice is melting, seas are rising, and entire coastlines of cities are imperiled. The weather in Portland, where he lives, is hot and constantly rainy; the city gets an average of 114” of rain per year, and it is 70° Fahrenheit in mid-March.

But Orr knows he doesn’t have the right to change reality for everyone—whether they are aware of it or not. So his conscience is making him miserable, and he tries to suppress his dreaming by taking illegal pharmaceuticals. When he is inevitably discovered, he is sent to government-mandated therapy.

His therapist, Dr. Haber, is a big man with an ego to match his size. Orr makes the mistake of being completely honest with Haber about his dreams. At first, of course, Haber thinks Orr is crazy, but after seeing his surroundings change during an induced dream state controlled by hypnotic suggestion, Haber realizes that he is telling the truth.

Haber doesn’t admit to Orr that he believes him, though. He acts like a dispassionate professional, diagnosing Orr with a severe psychological problem needing hypnotically-controlled dream therapy. Treatment provided, of course, by Haber himself.

Orr soon starts to suspect that Haber is actually using their dream sessions to remake the world as Haber wants it. And it is a scary moment indeed when we realize Orr is quite right in his suspicions. With each session, Haber becomes just a bit more powerful and famous; eventually he has become founder of his own institute of sleep research and influential with politicians and business leaders. But as things get better and better for Haber, they get potentially worse and worse for humanity.

The problem is that, even with the best intentions, Orr’s dreams have unintended consequences. Each one does what Haber asks for, but in unexpected and almost always worse ways. Each dream pulls humanity out of the frying pan and into the fire. (For example, Haber asks Orr to dream that people stop fighting wars with each other, so Orr dreams that human wars all stop… because we have had to band together to fight a terrifying alien foe.)

Eventually, Orr brings in a lawyer to witness the therapy sessions. During the session, Haber asks Orr to solve the environmental problems the world is having, and Orr dreams of a plague killing off six of the seven billion people on Earth. The lawyer is looking out the window as it happens, and sees people and buildings disappear, so she believes him too. But neither she nor Orr know how to stop Haber.

Orr tries to run away, but he can’t stop the dreams, and he can’t force himself to stay awake forever. And the pressure is turned up when he learns that Haber wants to replicate his brain waves, so that anyone can have “effective” dreams like his. And by “anyone,” of course, Haber means himself.

We have no idea how Orr is going to fix all of this, since the changes happen in dream states during which he has no control over his conscious thought. But it may just turn out that the very monsters he created with his dreams will be the source of his salvation.

There are two things that make Le Guin a seminal writer of science fiction. One is that she thinks extremely deeply, pulling all kinds of perceptive, unexpected insights out of what might appear to be a simple premise. And the other is that she has a clear, unpretentious, emotionally evocative way with words.

The Lathe of Heaven is based on an intriguing question: what would happen if you could alter reality with your dreams? The question seems fun and playful at first, but the more the story goes on, the more you realize how horrifying it could be. Dreams are uncontrollable, unpredictable, and subject to no laws of logic or law. You can make anything happen in them. And in the hands of someone like Haber, who is completely convinced of his own power and righteousness, it could result in global disaster.

By the end, you realize that the power to shift reality is a very dangerous thing. And that even if you do have the ability to do it and you think you’re doing it for humanity’s benefit, you shouldn’t. No one has the right to destroy reality for others, no matter how bad their reality is.

The Lathe of Heaven has a beautiful—and, at first, seemingly irrelevant—opening which looks at the world from the point of view of a jellyfish. The jellyfish is buffeted by the waves and directed by ocean currents. It has no real volition and no control over where it is going. It exists almost in a dream state. And it has no real problem with that unless and until it runs into rocky land.

Gradually, you realize that Orr’s state of being is akin to that of a jellyfish. He has very little control over what he does and where he is going. He is directed by the currents of his dreams when he sleeps, and by the currents of humanity when he is awake. This is particularly vivid at one point when he is riding the subway, hanging onto the strap, surrounded by people; he is actually physically held up by his fellow passengers, uncontrollably swaying to the motion of the crowd, like his spirit animal.

We might think at first that Orr and the jellyfish are weak and aimless. But I think what Le Guin wants us to see is that sometimes it is best to realize that you can’t control the currents surrounding you, and that you should flow with them instead, letting their energy propel you, judo-like, to where ever you are destined to go. And that, depending on the circumstances, this actually can be the strongest course of action—as it certainly is in Orr’s case.