** spoiler alert **
In 1975 Ursula K. Le Guin won both the Hugo and the Nebula for best novel for The Dispossessed. This was by no means the first time the same book had won both the Hugo and the Nebula. However, Le Guin had accomplished the same feat once before, in 1970 with The Left Hand of Darkness. As far as I knew at the time, she was the only author to have done this twice. (Arthur C. Clarke also did it, but later.) Therefore I read The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, and subsequently everything by Le Guin I could get my hands on. Thus I came to read The Lathe of Heaven. It is, I believe the first novel she wrote. It was not the first novel she published -- presumably the success of Left Hand of Darkness relieved the reluctance of some publishers.
Le Guin was the apogee of a movement. At the time I read Lathe of Heaven it was still gospel among literary types that all Science Fiction was trash. Some more lenient ones only claimed that 90% of SF was trash, which led to Sturgeon's Law -- 90% of EVERYTHING is trash. (Most Fantasy, too, though The Lord of the Rings was beginning to make a dent.) Indeed, there are still an awful lot of Self-Consciously Serious Readers who believe that all SF is trash. There were F&SF authors who wanted to show that F&SF could be real literature. Le Guin was not the first of these in time (I've seen Brian Aldiss credited with that), but she was, in my opinion, the height of the movement, the author who made it difficult to dismiss all SF out of hand, and still does. (There is also, to be crass, the commercial success of F&SF in literature and on screens.)
Lathe of Heaven is not Le Guin's best, but it is still very good. Recent reviews of Lathe of Heaven have a lot to say about how prescient it was. Since I read it around 1976, that had yet to appear. I liked the way it turns the "It was all just a dream" trope on its head. The point of the trope is to deny any importance to events that happen in the dream, because they aren't real.
In Lathe of Heaven George Orr's dreams change reality. Psychiatrist William Haber tries to use Orr's gift to fix the world. He asks Orr to dream a dream in which there is no longer any racial strife. The result is a world in which everyone is gray-skinned and looks much the same. Then he asks Orr to dream a dream in which humans no longer fight. The result is an alien invasion that unites humanity. Haber is intensely frustrated by what he regards as Orr's incompetence. He ultimately develops the technology to confer Orr's gift upon himself. But when he tries to use it, he breaks reality.
The aliens ultimately turn out to be cool, and to be familiar with the ability to dream new reality. They give Orr (I think -- it could be someone else, this is after all a 46-year-old memory for me) some advice about how to do it. They quote the Beatles song "With a Little Help from my Friends" and suggest that is the key. I remember being disappointed with that. It seemed a very pedestrian insight to reach after so strange a journey.
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It was required reading in high school and The Lathe Of Heaven became my second most favorite book (the first being Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy). I knew back then that I lived within ten miles of the author but never met her, but over 40 years later my roommate got to know her very well. Before she died she asked me if I could repair her favorite reading lamp. They didn't make mercury bulbs like that anymore but I managed to modernize it without making it look any different. In return she signed my book. I think I got the better deal. She was a fabulous lady, a brilliant writer, and will be sorely missed.
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A mind-stretching masterpiece
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 28, 2021
P. J. Dunn
Do the aliens also dream in the same manner?
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 12, 2020
Dan Williams
Still worth a read - 3.5 stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 14, 2022Miss S. A. Munn
A journey through worlds and minds.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 4, 2020
