Review: The Lathe of Heaven

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

LeGuin’s Earthsea trilogy was formative for me and, while I’m sad to find it holds up a little less well than some others of its time, I still have a fundamental fondness for the idea of her work. She’s one of the real architects of the fantastic, and her vision of linking language to experience was both imaginative on its own terms and a gesture toward some of the literary theory that would come along not too much after.

As I visit her sci-fi, though, I find her much more conventional in that genre. There’s a clever idea here – a man develops the capacity to reshape reality through dreams that he cannot control – but the rest is virtually clichéd. There’s the scientist who wants to use his power for control, and there’s the love interest who comes along just in time to help him resist.

As it is, this feels like classic 1970s science fiction, and that’s disappointing in two directions.

First, this is sci-fi that seems as if it has to answer its potential scientific critics. Instead of accepting a literary creation on its own terms, it offers explanations. (A classic example of the failing is the way George Lucas, having given us a goofy space opera in the original Star Wars, devolved the effective vagueness of ‘the force’ into something determined by ‘midi-chlorians’ measurable in the bloodstream.) I think of William Blake wishing for himself a “four-fold vision” – a mystical experience that would be all-consuming – yet fearing he might instead discover “single vision and Newton’s night,” a line I have always understood as a disappointment in the way science can strip away wonder from the world.

In other words, I respect that science fiction has to be internally consistent, but I think this (and perhaps other examples) are diminished when they seem gratuitously to answer questions that might occur to a critical reader. If LeGuin had written a book exploring euthanasia, I might be interested. I’m bored (or worse) when this book gives us a two-page summation of the argument and then moves onto other issues. It too often feels here as if she is imagining questions she might get from a panel of scientists or ethicists rather than following the narrative thread she’s opened up.

Second, this strikes me as a narcissistic vision, one that parallels what I remember (and what stereotype describes) as part of the zeitgeist of the early 1970s. This gimmick, the capacity for someone to reshape the world through dream, smacks of contemporaneous works like Jonathan Livingston Seagull or Pippin. It reads the experience of one person as tantamount to the experience of the entire world. In some of those others, there’s a naivete that, if it leaves them feeling dated, at least redeems them somewhat. This one, with its attempts to answer science and with LeGuin’s steady narrative hand, feels too polished to be forgiven. She’s simply too much a professional to get away with ham-handed work.

In the end, while I know others have admired this over the years, I think this is as weak an offering as I’ve ever found from LeGuin. I’m sure I’ll revisit her Earthsea work – maybe next time I’ll find I can again overlook its humorlessness – but I expect I’ll stay away from her science fiction.


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