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![The Lathe of Heaven by [Ursula K. Le Guin]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41kNxRM9O-L._SY346_.jpg)
The Lathe of Heaven Kindle Edition
Ursula K. Le Guin (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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In a near-future world beset by war, climate change, and overpopulation, Portland resident George Orr discovers that his dreams have the power to alter reality. Upon waking, the world he knew has become a strange, barely recognizable place, where only George has a clear memory of how it was before. Seeking escape from these “effective dreams,” George eventually turns to behavioral psychologist Dr. William Haber for a cure. But Haber has other ideas in mind.
Seeing the profound power of George’s dreams, Haber believes it must be harnessed for the greater good—no matter the cost. Soon, George is a pawn in Haber’s dangerous game, where the fate of humanity grows more imperiled with every waking hour.
As relevant today as it was when it won the Locus Award in 1971, The Lathe of Heaven is a true classic, at once eerie and prescient, entertaining and intelligent. In short, it does “what science fiction is supposed to do" (Newsweek).
"When I read The Lathe of Heaven as a young man, my mind was boggled; now when I read it…it breaks my heart. Only a great work of literature can bridge - so thrillingly - that impossible span."—Michael Chabon
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherDiversion Books
- Publication dateApril 20, 2014
- File size1065 KB
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Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Ursula K. Le Guin (19292018) was an American author of novels, childrens books, and short stories, mainly in the genres of fantasy and science fiction. She has also written poetry, literary criticism, and essays. She was widely recognized as one of the greatest science fiction writers in the history of the genre. She won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards on several occasions, as well as the National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, and many other honors and prizes. In 2014, she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
--This text refers to the audioCD edition.Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Confucius and you are both dreams, and I who say you are dreams am a dream myself. This is a paradox. Tomorrow a wise man may explain it; that tomorrow will not be for ten thousand generations.
-- Chuang Tse: II
Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moon-driven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.
But here rise the stubborn continents. The shelves of gravel and the cliffs of rock break from water baldly into air, that dry, terrible outerspace of radiance and instability, where there is no support for life. And now, now the currents mislead and the waves betray, breaking their endless circle, to leap up in loud foam against rock and air, breaking....
What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?
His eyelids had been burned away, so that he could not close his eyes, and the light entered into his brain, searing. He could not turn his head, for blocks of fallen concrete pinned him down and the steel rods projecting from their cores held his head in a vise. When these were gone he could move again; he sat up. He was on the cement steps; a dandelion flowered by his hand, growing from a little cracked place in the steps. After a while he stood up, but as soon as he was on his feet he felt deathly sick, and knew it was the radiation sickness. The door was only two feet from him, for the balloonbed when inflated half filled his room. He got to the door and opened it and went through it. There stretched the endless linoleum corridor, heaving slightly up and down for miles, and far down it, very far, the men's room. He started out toward it, trying to hold on to the wall, but there was nothing to hold on to, and the wall turned into the floor.
"Easy now. Easy there."
The elevator guard's face was hanging above him like a paper lantern, pallid, fringed with graying hair.
"It's the radiation," he said, but Mannie didn't seem to understand, saying only, "Take it easy."
He was back on his bed in his room.
"You drunk?"
"No."
"High on something?"
"Sick."
"What you been taking?"
"Couldn't find the fit," he said, meaning that he had been trying to lock the door through which the dreams came, but none of the keys had fit the lock.
"Medic's coming up from the fifteenth floor," Mannie said faintly through the roar of breaking seas.
He was floundering and trying to breathe. A stranger was sitting on his bed holding a hypodermic and looking at him.
"That did it," the stranger said. "He's coming round. Feel like hell? Take it easy. You ought to feel like hell. Take all this at once?" He displayed seven of the little plastifoil envelopes from the autodrug dispensary. "Lousy mixture, barbiturates and Dexedrine. What were you trying to do to yourself?"
It was hard to breathe, but the sickness was gone, leaving only an awful weakness.
"They're all dated this week," the medic went on, a young man with a brown ponytail and bad teeth. "Which means they're not all off your own Pharmacy Card, so I've got to report you for borrowing. I don't like to, but I got called in and I haven't any choice, see. But don't worry, with these drugs it's not a felony, you'll just get a notice to report to the police station and they'll send you up to the Med School or the Area Clinic for examination, and you'll be referred to an M.D. or a shrink for VTT -- Voluntary Therapeutic Treatment. I filled out the form on you already, used your ID; all I need to know is how long you been using these drugs in more than your personal allotment?"
"Couple months."
The medic scribbled on a paper on his knee.
"And who'd you borrow Pharm Cards from?"
"Friends."
"Got to have the names."
After a while the medic said, "One name, anyhow. Just a formality. It won't get 'em in trouble. See, they'll just get a reprimand from the police, and HEW Control will keep a check on their Pharm Cards for a year. Just a formality. One name."
"I can't. They were trying to help me."
"Look, if you won't give the names, you're resisting, and you'll either go to jail or get stuck into Obligatory Therapy, in an institution. Anyway they can trace the cards through the autodrug records if they want to, this just saves 'em time. Come on, just give me one of the names."
He covered his face with his arms to keep out the unendurable light and said, "I can't. I can't do it. I need help."
"He borrowed my card," the elevator guard said. "Yeah. Mannie Ahrens, 247-602-6023." The medic's pen went scribble scribble.
"I never used your card."
"So confuse 'em a little. They won't check. People use people's Pharm Cards all the time, they can't check. I loan mine, use another cat's, all the time. Got a whole collection of those reprimand things. They don't know. I taken things HEW never even heard of. You ain't been on the hook before. Take it easy, George."
"I can't," he said, meaning that he could not let Mannie lie for him, could not stop him from lying for him, could not take it easy, could not go on.
"You'll feel better in two, three hours," the medic said. "But stay in today. Anyhow downtown's all tied up, the GPRT drivers are trying another strike and the National Guard's trying to run the subway trains and the news says it's one hell of a mess. Stay put. I got to go, I walk to work, damn it, ten minutes from here, that State Housing Complex down on Macadam." The bed jounced as he stood up. "You know there's two hundred sixty kids in that one complex suffering from kwashiorkor? All low-income or Basic Support families, and they aren't getting protein. And what the hell am I supposed to do about it? I've put in five different reqs for Minimal Protein Ration for those kids and they don't come, it's all red tape and excuses. People on Basic Support can afford to buy sufficient food, they keep telling me. Sure, but what if the food isn't there to buy? Ah, the hell with it. I go give 'em Vitamin C shots and try to pretend that starvation is just scurvy...."
The door shut. The bed jounced when Mannie sat down on it where the medic had been sitting. There was a faint smell, sweetish, like newly cut grass. Out of the darkness of closed eyes, the mist rising all round, Mannie's voice said remotely, "Ain't it great to be alive?"Copyright © 1971 by Ursula K. Le GuinCopyright renewed © 1999 by Ursula K. Le Guin
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.Review
"A rare and powerful synthesis of poetry and science, reason and emotion." -- The New York Times
"Gracefully developed...extremely inventive.... What science fiction is supposed to do." -- Newsweek
"Profound. Beautifully wrought...[Le Guin's] perceptions of such matters as geopolitics, race, socialized medicine, and the patient-shrink relationship are razor sharp and more than a little cutting." -- National Review --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Amazon.com Review
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 doesn't share George's 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 Guin's 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
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.From AudioFile
From The Washington Post
Product details
- ASIN : B087X6Z1GS
- Publisher : Diversion Books (April 20, 2014)
- Publication date : April 20, 2014
- Language : English
- File size : 1065 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 194 pages
- Lending : Enabled
- Best Sellers Rank: #40,013 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #179 in Psychic Thrillers
- #292 in Psychological Literary Fiction
- #294 in Psychic Suspense
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (US /ˈɜːrsələ ˈkroʊbər ləˈɡwɪn/; born October 21, 1929) is an American author of novels, children's books, and short stories, mainly in the genres of fantasy and science fiction. She has also written poetry and essays. First published in the 1960s, her work has often depicted futuristic or imaginary alternative worlds in politics, the natural environment, gender, religion, sexuality and ethnography.
She influenced such Booker Prize winners and other writers as Salman Rushdie and David Mitchell – and notable science fiction and fantasy writers including Neil Gaiman and Iain Banks. She has won the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Locus Award, and World Fantasy Award, each more than once. In 2014, she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Le Guin has resided in Portland, Oregon since 1959.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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Reviewed in the United States on December 8, 2020
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And, man, am I glad I checked it out. Often viewed as Le Guin's tribute to the works of Philip K. Dick, The Lathe of Heaven undeniably feels a lot like a Dick novel, with a surreal hook used to explore philosophical questions about reality and who we really are. But as you'd expect from Le Guin, there's no shortage of more social questions raised here, from the nature of peace to the dangers of global warming, all done within a great narrative that twists and turns underneath you.
The hook is simple enough: there's a man named George Orr (yes, the half allusion is probably intentional) who is scared to dream, because his dreams become real. But what makes this hard to prove is that his dreams don't just create reality; they rewrite it, making whatever he dreams not only true, but making it always have been true, so that no one remembers the change but him. That's true until George goes to court-mandated therapy, where his therapist seems to be aware of the change - and his ability to possibly control George's ability.
Like she did in The Dispossessed, Le Guin explores any number of ideas about utopias, the role of the individual in society, the question of the greater good, and her concerns about utilitarianism. At what point should the individual give way for society? Where is the cutoff between acceptable sacrifice for the greater good and too much? And what is the responsibility of one person to give it all for the world? But whereas The Dispossessed engaged with these ideas in the forms of detailed discussions, The Lathe of Heaven lets them remain more subtextual, unfolding as a battle of wills between George, his therapist, and a lawyer George brings in to help him. More than that, The Lathe of Heaven unfolds as a bizarre thriller of sorts, with reality constantly bending and shifting underneath us, and Le Guin able to explore the ramifications of so many changes, and what it would take to fix some of the problems in our world.
It all adds up to a great book, one that I really enjoyed. And if it's a bit derivative of PKD, well, that's okay, because Le Guin makes it her own, following the political and social ramifications of her conceit, not just the philosophical ones. It's a book I really enjoyed and absolutely couldn't put down, and has me eager to dive into more of an author I don't feel like I ever properly appreciated in her lifetime.
Orr gets assigned to voluntary therapy with a psychologist who specializes in sleep disorders. Orr tells Dr. William Haber about his unique condition, but, once the doctor recognizes Orr is telling the truth, Haber draws the opposite conclusion from Orr. Haber thinks that Orr should be using his “power” to make the world a better place, rather than being scared of it and trying to avoid it. Haber presents the classic example of good intentions gone awry. While the doctor does use the hypnotically-induced sessions to improve his own career situation, the worst outcomes result from the doctor’s attempts to help Orr (without Orr’s approval or prior knowledge) to improve the world. The law of unintended consequences is ever-present, and the dreams guided by Haber often result in “out of the frying pan and into the fire” situations.
This is an interesting premise in a highly readable book. The contrast between Orr and Haber reflects a broader societal tension between those who think they can engineer a utopian future and those who think that one’s attempts will always blow up in ways that one can’t anticipate. It should be noted that the title comes from “The Book of Chuang Tzu” and the virtue of “wu-wei” or “actionless action” in contrast to the corresponding vice of trying to manhandle the world into a desired state is central to the story.
I enjoyed this book. It’s a short novel with a clear theme that is thought-provoking. I’d recommend the book for fiction readers, and highly recommend it for readers of sci-fi and speculative fiction.
And yet she manages to make her hero compelling because of his struggles. And the Aliens---comic, understated, and wise. No space opera, big battles etc They are actually good at small scale retail! Chuang-tze would roar with laughter.

By The Dancing Banana on December 8, 2020

Top reviews from other countries


However it is not time travel that is the mechanism here but designer dreams, and the dream mechanism isn’t just used as a cop out one for one replacement for time travel. The dynamics are different and engaging, and the actual motivation of, and the impact of events on, the main characters is intriguing.
Even more intriguing are the aliens that pop up. Would those aliens even be in existence if it wasn’t for the dreams? Do they have the same dream powers as they seem to hint at? If so do they refrain from using them or have they used them?

I would have given it 3.5 if I could. 3 wouldn't be fair. I don't usually go for the classics because the ideas often read so twee. In this, they did but not quite as much as I feared.
The story is still well paced even if the characters are a bit poorly built and the dialogue slightly wooden (but I think that was the hard sci-fi style in vogue back then; a sort of austere Blade-Runner voice-over tone). The 'futurism' was more or less in line with recent scifi, even if the social commentary lagged a bit; even so, definitely not to the point of ridiculousness. And even where it did diverge, it was interesting to see what the
author thought the future might hold for society back when she wrote the book.
Not a bad read. Would recommend.

Ray Smillie
