The Lathe of Heaven
February 6, 2023 5:56 AM Subscribe
Kelly Link in Praise of Ursula K. Le Guin's Genuine Magic - "It is also, notably, Le Guin's deliberate foray into Philip K. Dick's territory, with its hallucinatory beginning, its drug-using protagonist, and its surreal, literally world-melting alternate realities. Dick and Le Guin were admirers of each other's work and occasional correspondents."
On Karel Čapek's Prophetic Science Fiction Novel 'War With the Newts' [ebook/radio] - "The Czech writer's darkly humorous novel, published in 1936, anticipated our current reality with eerie accuracy."
As I reread The Lathe of Heaven this summer, it was striking how resonant Le Guin’s work remains in 2022, even as the future she describes, 2002, recedes into our past. Portland as a place of social upheaval, experimentation, revolutionary change; plagues; war; looming shortages; climate change; cramped housing; limited social services; the threat of volcanic eruption. I was reminded of contemporary popular online conspiracy theories that posit we now live in an alternate timeline; for example, the belief that the Berenstain Bears books were once the Berenstein Bears instead, before the world shifted minutely...also btw...
The protagonist of The Lathe of Heaven is, of course, named George Orr, which can be read as a wink toward Orwell, but later on another character calls him, jokingly, “Mr. Either Orr,” a bit of wordplay Le Guin used more than once in reference to Oregon as a place of fantastical slippage as well as a state of mind. Le Guin’s meaning is seldom singular, and, like George Orr, she remade the world again and again in her books.
On Karel Čapek's Prophetic Science Fiction Novel 'War With the Newts' [ebook/radio] - "The Czech writer's darkly humorous novel, published in 1936, anticipated our current reality with eerie accuracy."
It is difficult to understand how the analogy of the newts to colonized peoples could not have always struck readers as one of the most obvious features of the novel, but indeed literary critics for many decades managed to fail to explore the devastating power of Čapek’s critique of colonialism. One of the main thrusts of Čapek’s satire is to show, over and over, how the human world renders the newts into a kind of natural resource as laborers and simultaneously makes them invisible as fellow beings. All the while as the newts are being invaded and exploited in pursuit of the massive expropriation of natural resources, then bought and sold as slave labor, they are also being exoticized, fetishized, anatomized and experimented upon, forced into ghettos, and made into scapegoats. Indeed, detailing the various ways in which humans look at and fail to see the newts makes up most of the novel... The not-so-funny joke at the heart of “War with the Newts” is our seemingly infinite capacity to place our faith in two self-contradictory fantasies: the capitalist fantasy of a constantly expanding economy, and the colonial fantasy of empty lands whose very reason for existing is to be occupied and exploited by the colonial masters.
Loved this book too as well as Earthsea but I am pretty sure I heard an interview once with a cranky '70s PKD going "nah, I don't like her stuff..."
posted by johngoren at 8:34 AM on February 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by johngoren at 8:34 AM on February 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
Lathe of Heaven was the first Le Guin book I ever read, at maybe eleven or twelve as a precocious and voracious reader who was mostly chewing through Stephen King novels at the time. One my my dad's successful gambles at sticking something he cared about in front of my nose and hoping I'd dig in. It really knocked me on my ass as a style and kind of narrative; at the time I wouldn't have appreciated the Orwell joke (I hadn't read 1984) and I wouldn't have gotten the Dickian resonance (hadn't read any of his stuff yet) and I didn't even know what a lathe was; there was a ton of other stuff in the context and content of the book that I am certain went over my head as well. But the central premise of marrying up midas touch wish fulfillment powers with all the guilt and anxiety and sense of loss that that would put on a person was stunning and the early narrative reveal with the artwork in the therapist's office hit me like a truck.
I reread it again years later and appreciated a lot of the details and texture more; I think at this point I'm well overdue to come back to it yet again.
posted by cortex at 8:34 AM on February 6, 2023 [9 favorites]
I reread it again years later and appreciated a lot of the details and texture more; I think at this point I'm well overdue to come back to it yet again.
posted by cortex at 8:34 AM on February 6, 2023 [9 favorites]
War With the Newts! One of those books that reached up to me from the past and spoke clearly about the present - that book is like having a Time Machine in your house. Much recommended.
posted by q*ben at 8:35 AM on February 6, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by q*ben at 8:35 AM on February 6, 2023 [6 favorites]
These are two great novels.
The Lathe of Heaven is one of LeGuin's best: powerful, subtle, achingly empathetic.
I read it around the same edge as cortex and was blown away by the sheer imagination. It introduced me to Taoism and to Portland, Oregon (I was in New York). And it added to my fear of WWIII.
The PBS adaptation is uneven but works really well, even now.
War with the Newts is terrific, hilarious and penetrating in its analysis of the contemporary world. There's a great bit where each European nation tries to find newts in their cultural contexts, so the French link them to Charlemagne and the Germans figure out there's an Uber-Newt.
posted by doctornemo at 9:05 AM on February 6, 2023 [4 favorites]
The Lathe of Heaven is one of LeGuin's best: powerful, subtle, achingly empathetic.
I read it around the same edge as cortex and was blown away by the sheer imagination. It introduced me to Taoism and to Portland, Oregon (I was in New York). And it added to my fear of WWIII.
The PBS adaptation is uneven but works really well, even now.
War with the Newts is terrific, hilarious and penetrating in its analysis of the contemporary world. There's a great bit where each European nation tries to find newts in their cultural contexts, so the French link them to Charlemagne and the Germans figure out there's an Uber-Newt.
posted by doctornemo at 9:05 AM on February 6, 2023 [4 favorites]
Le Guin's books are some of the few sci-fi/fantasy/speculative fiction/whatever novels I loved when I was a kid and weren't a disappointing re-reading experience as an adult.
posted by The Card Cheat at 9:18 AM on February 6, 2023 [8 favorites]
posted by The Card Cheat at 9:18 AM on February 6, 2023 [8 favorites]
In 2020, during the height of the pandemic, I re-read a bunch of LeGuin books I had read when I was young. I got so much more out of them this time. The Wizard of Earthsea books work very well as YA, but they're even better reading them as an adult.
posted by vibrotronica at 10:10 AM on February 6, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by vibrotronica at 10:10 AM on February 6, 2023 [6 favorites]
I'm currently working my way through the Le Guin corpus. I haven't gotten to The Lathe of Heaven yet, which is one I somehow never got to before either; I'm looking forward to it, as I have each of her books.
I think Le Guin may be one of the most underappreciated authors of the 20th century (not that she was unappreciated!). So many of her books were not only ahead of their time, but are still ahead of our time decades later. The Dispossessed is as subtle and horizon-expanding today as it was in the 70s, maybe more so. While our society is in a very different place today with regards to some of her major subjects of interrogation, such as gender, compared to when she wrote most of her stories, in regards to her deepest inquiries into the nature of social power, and the role of individual freedom within a harmonious social whole, I think she still stands as a nearly lone candle in the dark.
She's so good it's almost painful to read her sometimes, like enjoying a perfect sunset.
posted by biogeo at 10:14 AM on February 6, 2023 [15 favorites]
I think Le Guin may be one of the most underappreciated authors of the 20th century (not that she was unappreciated!). So many of her books were not only ahead of their time, but are still ahead of our time decades later. The Dispossessed is as subtle and horizon-expanding today as it was in the 70s, maybe more so. While our society is in a very different place today with regards to some of her major subjects of interrogation, such as gender, compared to when she wrote most of her stories, in regards to her deepest inquiries into the nature of social power, and the role of individual freedom within a harmonious social whole, I think she still stands as a nearly lone candle in the dark.
She's so good it's almost painful to read her sometimes, like enjoying a perfect sunset.
posted by biogeo at 10:14 AM on February 6, 2023 [15 favorites]
In 2020, during the height of the pandemic, I re-read a bunch of LeGuin books I had read when I was young. I got so much more out of them this time. The Wizard of Earthsea books work very well as YA, but they're even better reading them as an adult.
I did the same thing a few years ago with the Earthsea novels and had a similar experience. Lois Lowry's The Giver is also worth a read as an adult.
posted by Dr. Twist at 10:20 AM on February 6, 2023 [3 favorites]
I did the same thing a few years ago with the Earthsea novels and had a similar experience. Lois Lowry's The Giver is also worth a read as an adult.
posted by Dr. Twist at 10:20 AM on February 6, 2023 [3 favorites]
I am a Lathe-of-Heaven-naysayer! It's my least favorite of all her books, I think because it's a little too much like PKD whose work is only sometimes good enough for me. But I feel like it's an early work, where she still felt the constraints of the tropes and acceptable subjects of her chosen genre in the moment in which she entered it.
Her late work is so rich. I am an outlier, I think, in that I liked Lavinia.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 10:26 AM on February 6, 2023 [3 favorites]
Her late work is so rich. I am an outlier, I think, in that I liked Lavinia.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 10:26 AM on February 6, 2023 [3 favorites]
Her late work is so rich. I am an outlier, I think, in that I liked Lavinia.
Since she passed, I have been diving deeper and deeper into her work, particularly her later work, and oh man. As good as her currently famous "classic" works are, her later career is an untapped motherlode of goodness that should not be flying under the cultural radar as much as it is. The "Powers" trilogy is as good as anything she's ever written. I haven't even gotten to Lavinia yet!
posted by billjings at 11:01 AM on February 6, 2023 [5 favorites]
Since she passed, I have been diving deeper and deeper into her work, particularly her later work, and oh man. As good as her currently famous "classic" works are, her later career is an untapped motherlode of goodness that should not be flying under the cultural radar as much as it is. The "Powers" trilogy is as good as anything she's ever written. I haven't even gotten to Lavinia yet!
posted by billjings at 11:01 AM on February 6, 2023 [5 favorites]
I think I was 8 or 9 when I first read it, and boy did it make an impact. Made me realize that Heinlein, et. al., were fun reads, but not really that great writing. LeGuin on the other hand...
posted by kjs3 at 11:44 AM on February 6, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by kjs3 at 11:44 AM on February 6, 2023 [3 favorites]
Is The Lathe of Heaven, I wonder, the first SF book to incorporate the concept of the Dreamtime? The idea of dreams breaking through into reality is pure PKD, of course. But Le Guin's background in anthropology would have made her familiar with the Dreamtime before it became widely known in popular culture.
I like The Lathe of Heaven, but there's one passage that has always jarred on me, and that's the bit at the end where the author's voice intrudes into the narrative:
There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.
Le Guin has a tendency to slip these preachy bits into her early novels (she does the same thing in A Wizard of Earthsea) and I find it an awkward tonal shift that takes me out of the fictional world. In her later novels she knows her craft much better and leaves her characters to speak and act for themselves.
posted by verstegan at 11:46 AM on February 6, 2023
I like The Lathe of Heaven, but there's one passage that has always jarred on me, and that's the bit at the end where the author's voice intrudes into the narrative:
There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.
Le Guin has a tendency to slip these preachy bits into her early novels (she does the same thing in A Wizard of Earthsea) and I find it an awkward tonal shift that takes me out of the fictional world. In her later novels she knows her craft much better and leaves her characters to speak and act for themselves.
posted by verstegan at 11:46 AM on February 6, 2023
Before there was Jar Jar, Le Guin gave us George Orr.
posted by straight at 11:56 AM on February 6, 2023 [9 favorites]
posted by straight at 11:56 AM on February 6, 2023 [9 favorites]
The "Powers" trilogy is as good as anything she's ever written.
Of the Powers trilogy, I kept coming back to Voices (the second volume) during the years between 2016 and now. How do you rid yourself of occupation by a hostile force?
I liked the deliberate work of keeping one's balance in a city tilting like a shipwreck. Whispering to the street-corner god-niches "Bless me and be blessed." And the oracular message "Broken mend broken."
I liked Lavinia too; I liked Le Guin's take on early Latin ritual and religion. I liked how it came back to the central Le Guin virtue of "keeping the house" when the house is under siege; keeping one's soul intact when the self is under siege.
I haven't really found a way into The Lathe Of Heaven yet; I keep starting and stalling. But it's nice to know that there's one more unread Le Guin in the world, whether I ever get to it or not.
posted by Pallas Athena at 12:04 PM on February 6, 2023 [6 favorites]
Of the Powers trilogy, I kept coming back to Voices (the second volume) during the years between 2016 and now. How do you rid yourself of occupation by a hostile force?
I liked the deliberate work of keeping one's balance in a city tilting like a shipwreck. Whispering to the street-corner god-niches "Bless me and be blessed." And the oracular message "Broken mend broken."
I liked Lavinia too; I liked Le Guin's take on early Latin ritual and religion. I liked how it came back to the central Le Guin virtue of "keeping the house" when the house is under siege; keeping one's soul intact when the self is under siege.
I haven't really found a way into The Lathe Of Heaven yet; I keep starting and stalling. But it's nice to know that there's one more unread Le Guin in the world, whether I ever get to it or not.
posted by Pallas Athena at 12:04 PM on February 6, 2023 [6 favorites]
I saw the first PBS adaptation when it came out in 1980 (previously). To this day, I think it's one of the finest adaptations of an SF novel ever filmed. (With the caveat that I was 11-years-old—which is the Golden Age of Science Fiction—the first time I saw it.) "Antwerp" was my first MetaFilter password, when I made an account back in the 20th century.
Of course the book is even better, one of my very favorites. Previously we discussed a Guardian interview with LeGuin where she said:
Of course the book is even better, one of my very favorites. Previously we discussed a Guardian interview with LeGuin where she said:
The Lathe of Heaven is a taoist novel, not a utopian or dystopian one. It's just this world in its usual degree of mess and misery, or a little more so. Haber is a utopian, yes: and he tries to use George's dreams to achieve his quite rational notions of how things might be improved: but every time he tries it, things get worse. There is an old American saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." The novel extends that a bit - "Even if it's broke, if you don't know how to fix it, don't."posted by straight at 12:30 PM on February 6, 2023 [8 favorites]
Is The Lathe of Heaven, I wonder, the first SF book to incorporate the concept of the Dreamtime?
I don't know, but Le Guin also draws on the concept in The Word for World is Forest, which I'm reading right now. That was published in 1972, versus 1971 for The Lathe of Heaven, so she must have been thinking about it a lot at the time.
posted by biogeo at 3:41 PM on February 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
Thank you straight for sharing that typically brilliant Le Guinian formulation of the hubristic mindset.
posted by domdib at 4:14 PM on February 6, 2023
posted by domdib at 4:14 PM on February 6, 2023
I was hooked from Rocannon's World on.
posted by y2karl at 4:28 PM on February 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by y2karl at 4:28 PM on February 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
Gifts fundamentally changed me as a child. It was my first exposure to the idea that parents could lie, viciously and maliciously. That they could be selfish and manipulative and make their children suffer for their own gain. All of it be hidden behind a veneer of love and support.
I was, like Orrec, a very sheltered child who was taught any misstep would spell disaster and destruction. And like him, it was through reading that I realized my parents were lying. I can't say that Gifts was the only reason I was able to leave as soon as I turned 18, but it sure as hell helped.
posted by brook horse at 4:47 PM on February 6, 2023 [8 favorites]
I was, like Orrec, a very sheltered child who was taught any misstep would spell disaster and destruction. And like him, it was through reading that I realized my parents were lying. I can't say that Gifts was the only reason I was able to leave as soon as I turned 18, but it sure as hell helped.
posted by brook horse at 4:47 PM on February 6, 2023 [8 favorites]
The album Sgt Pepper may have been a big hit, but it's only single wasn't a big hit. Except in our thoughts...
posted by ovvl at 5:13 PM on February 6, 2023
posted by ovvl at 5:13 PM on February 6, 2023
I am a Lathe-of-Heaven-naysayer! It's my least favorite of all her books, I think because it's a little too much like PKD whose work is only sometimes good enough for me.
I didn't like it as much as I thought I would either, for the opposite reason: it isn't PKD enough.
It starts well, with that beautiful jellyfish thing then the perfect tone of broken-cog-in-the-broken-machine paranoia, but "be careful what you wish for" isn't a very exciting theme to spend a whole book with. A story about brain-stimulated dreams bleeding into reality should be waaaaaaay more delirious.
(Has anyone else read Gwyneth Jones' Kairos? It does something broadly similar but in a near future extrapolated from the UK of the 1980s rather than the US of the 1960s, and is much weirder.)
Anyway:
Before there was Jar Jar, Le Guin gave us George Orr.
The aliens do call him "Jor Jor". Maybe there's something in that?
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 3:21 AM on February 7, 2023
I didn't like it as much as I thought I would either, for the opposite reason: it isn't PKD enough.
It starts well, with that beautiful jellyfish thing then the perfect tone of broken-cog-in-the-broken-machine paranoia, but "be careful what you wish for" isn't a very exciting theme to spend a whole book with. A story about brain-stimulated dreams bleeding into reality should be waaaaaaay more delirious.
(Has anyone else read Gwyneth Jones' Kairos? It does something broadly similar but in a near future extrapolated from the UK of the 1980s rather than the US of the 1960s, and is much weirder.)
Anyway:
Before there was Jar Jar, Le Guin gave us George Orr.
The aliens do call him "Jor Jor". Maybe there's something in that?
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 3:21 AM on February 7, 2023
Kelly Link is wonderful. I cannot wait for her upcoming book.
posted by yellowcandy at 10:58 AM on February 7, 2023
posted by yellowcandy at 10:58 AM on February 7, 2023
I haven't seen the 1980 PBS version, but the 2002 A&E Channel tv-movie adaptation with Lukas Haas, Lisa Bonet and David Strathairn was faithful to the book and quite well done. There's a rather muddy-looking copy of it available on YouTube.
posted by warreng at 9:38 PM on February 7, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by warreng at 9:38 PM on February 7, 2023 [1 favorite]
The aliens do call him "Jor Jor".
I tell jokes with a little help from my friends.
posted by straight at 7:20 AM on February 8, 2023
I tell jokes with a little help from my friends.
posted by straight at 7:20 AM on February 8, 2023
How Our Reality May Be a Sum of All Possible Realities - "They used two main hacks to do this. First, they made time an imaginary number, a strange trick that turns amplitudes into real numbers. Then they approximated the infinite space-time continuum as a finite grid... But the richer perspective comes at a price. Some physicists dislike removing a load-bearing element of reality such as time. The Euclidean path integral 'is really completely unphysical,' Loll said. Her camp endeavors to keep time in the path integral, situating it in the space-time we know and love, where causes strictly precede effects." :P
posted by kliuless at 1:59 AM on February 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by kliuless at 1:59 AM on February 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
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