The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
175 pages
Published 1971
Read from February 20 to February 23
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Wikipedia's brief summary of the book -- top-billing "a character whose dreams alter reality" -- muted my interest in it last year, when I was going through my Read All the Le Guins phase. Psychics and their sci-fi potential have never grabbed me. The overabundance of psionic powers is one of the sillier markers of New Wave SF. But this month, references to Lathe seemed to have popped up everywhere. Well, in two places: the epigraph and thematic content of Among Others, and in a random social media interaction I had where an acquaintance praised Le Guin's description of love as a thing that must be made. There was nothing for it but to request a copy and catch up with everyone else.
Lathe is pretty good, but I couldn't shake the sense that it was Le Guin's attempt at a technothriller. The characters of Heather and Haber, especially, seemed like the sort of broadly two-dimensional figures a Crichton or a Koontz would employ; Haber's technobabble infodumps seemed more suited to an early Crichton novel than a Le Guin. But it's a damn good technothriller, handled with far more delicacy and insight than the standard airport novelist can muster. Most critics draw perhaps more apt comparisons to Dick, but the general conceit of a character who can change reality aside, I don't see it. The philosophical stuff about positivism against pseudo-Taoist acceptance was a bit of a yawn for me; I'm past the age where that would make much of an impression on me.
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