In Portland, OR, 2002, draftsman George Orr is arrested for illegal possession and forced to undergo “voluntary” therapy or face jail time. At his first session, George explains to his therapist, Dr. Haber, that he has been taking the drugs in order to suppress his dreams. Because George has the ability, he explains to Dr. Haber, to change reality by dreaming a different world. He refers to these as “effective” dreams, and has been looking for a way to either cure himself of the ability, or just not dream altogether.

Dr. Haber, of course, doesn’t believe George, but he does explain the importance of dreams to our own mental health. He then hypnotizes George in order to test Orr’s claims. George dreams of a horse and, upon waking, the mural on Dr. Haber’s wall of nearby Mount Hood has become a portrait of a famous horse, instead. To Dr. Haber, however, there was never a Mount Hood mural, it was always the horse. Because that’s how George’s “effective” dreams work. He wakes up to a new reality, with all the memories of the old world AND all the new “memories” of the new world as well, while for everyone else, there was only the one world, the current world, and all other memories are purged from their minds.

Only in this case, Dr. Haber was there when the change took place, in the center of it with George, and he actually does remember the Mount Hood mural. While he doesn’t at first admit it to George, Dr. Haber knows his patient is telling the truth. So instead of working with George to cure him, the good doctor begins to use the man’s powers instead to make the world a better place--at least, in his view.

He starts with a new, more important job for himself. No longer a poor therapist with a crappy office, Dr. Haber is now the head of a government-run research facility.

George begins to suspect Haber’s actions and he hires a lawyer to come to his next session, hoping to get him taken out of Dr. Haber’s care and placed elsewhere. This time, Dr. Haber plays thing safer and works with George on his feelings of being over-crowded. Well, there are several million people in Portland alone. Poverty and malnutrition are high. So George dreams of a less crowded world. And when he wakes up, reality shifts and suddenly there are memories of a plague several years earlier which wiped out most of the planet’s population.

This time, Heather Lelache, the lawyer, was there, and while it takes her a little time to admit what she saw, eventually she helps George dream of a kinder, less devious Dr. Haber. Only, by this time, Haber has instructed George to dream of world peace and, in doing so, George has brought into existence an alien race, camped out on the moon, a common enemy for all the people of earth to concentrate on, thus ending fighting among our own nations. And when Heather is putting George into hypnosis, she adds, dream the aliens are no longer on the moon. When George wakes, the aliens are indeed no longer on the moon. Now they’ve landed on Earth.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s THE LATHE OF HEAVEN is a novel I had searched a while for. I saw it years ago in Stephen King’s DANCE MACABRE as one of the “important” books within the genre, so naturally I wanted to read it. Eventually I tracked it down, when the used book store downtown was going out of business, and was able to read it. What an experience.

I love stories that deal so heavily with perception and reality, especially unreliable reality. George’s power is a frightening one to consider, especially given the nature of some of our dreams. He doesn’t have control over what he dreams, and even the most detailed instructions from Dr. Haber can be twisted--for example Dr. Haber tells George to dream of a world where there is no more race discrimination and when George wakes up, that problem is solved; everyone’s skin is grey. This is a premise full of possibility and very fascinating to me.

Le Guin’s prose is perfect. In THE LATHE OF HEAVEN, she was able to keep the story clear, detailed, and logical, while still being able to convey that confusion George must surely feel trying to rectify each new reality he’s created, sorting out the new memories from the old, but she never feels the need to bash us over the head with it. She trusts her reader, and that’s something I very much would love to learn from her; I have a tendency to over-write in an effort to make sure the reader has no doubts as to what’s going on, and I know it gets tedious for the reader sometimes. So this is definitely a lesson I hope to take away from THE LATHE OF HEAVEN.

I wasn’t entirely satisfied with how the story turned out in the end, I felt there were a few aspects I’d have liked to see cleared up a little better, but this isn’t a flaw in the book, rather it’s a flaw in my own expectations. Le Guin didn’t go for the traditional Hollywood ending where George has one final dream during a moment of extreme stress and wakes to find the world truly is, finally, perfect and he rides off into the sunset. Instead, the effects George has made through his dreams continue on. Once he’s dreamed the aliens, he doesn’t undream them. I think this speaks mostly to Dr. Haber’s character, however, moreso than George’s. George really is the victim of Haber’s hypnotic suggestions and the doctor’s main goal here is to figure out how George does what he does, and then how to grant himself that ability because, obviously, George’s subconscious is way too susceptible to vague interpretations. Dr. Haber wants to be able to cut out the middle man and dream a more perfect world in HIS own image, and with that goal in mind, everything else is put out of sight and out of mind. When George kills most of the world through plague, Dr. Haber never convinces him to dream them all back into existence. When the aliens land, Haber never tries to get George to undream them.

At first I felt frustrated over these aspects of the plot, until I realized all of these decisions were speaking more clearly about George’s nemesis’s personality than it did George’s, or any weakness in le Guin’s ability. This really was an awesome book.

The subtext and symbology in a novel like this are well-played, beautifully represented, and, like the plot, never overdone or beaten to death. Taoism runs throughout the story, represented most clearly in the Chuang Tse quotes that open most of the chapters, most importantly chapter 3: “To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.” The two main characters are wonderfully portrayed versions of the perfect opposites when it comes to the philosophies presented. George has no idea how or why he can do what he does, all he’s certain of is it’s not his place in the world to effect the natural order. Dr. Haber is able to figure out how, not necessarily the why, but he has no such problem dictating the course the world takes, having convinced himself that he knows what’s best and is able to make that decision on his own.

This really is a novel to stand in awe of, and it’s no wonder I’ve so often read its title in relation to some of the most important books a writer can read.

Truth is, THE LATHE OF HEAVEN is probably a smarter book than I should even be reading, certainly a smarter book than I should be reviewing. This one clearly illustrates the difference between SCI-FI and Science Fiction. This is the latter, in all its brilliant glory.

Recommended: Yes