The Lathe of Heaven

I have a complicated relationship with Le Guin's books.

I very much love her accomplishments and contributions to science fiction, I love the concepts she tackles and I love a lot of the things she does in her books, but sometimes I find myself not completely taken in my her writing.

By the end of this book I loved it, but there were times in this short, short book where I was reading it out of obligation. I understood what she was doing in this book but it was difficult to find much of a connection to any of the characters. Again, I get what she was going for, but it didn't make for an enjoyable read because, well, I didn't care about the characters until near the end.

Frustrations aside, I've seen a lot of people come to the conclusion that this is a warning about playing god or being greedy. While I think there are parts of that to this, to say that's the point of the book seems to undercut a lot of the metaphor and allegory buried deep in there.

At the core is George Orr, a man who can “change reality” through his dreams, thus he needs to self-medicate to avoid changing the world. That world that George lives in doesn't sound too great. He's lonely, depressed, anxious and clearly unable to face the reality around him. Something like asking out the girl at the lawyer's office churns inside of him into the fantastical, as does his relationship with Dr. Haber.

As someone who's met someone and immediately created a fictional future with that person it makes sense. To George, he sees multiple realities with Heather, all while Dr. Haber is there, pulling the strings to make him do stuff he doesn't want to do. This begs the question: how much of the world George is seeing and how he's seeing it actually a construct of his anxiety and depression?

This is a book that worth reading, considering and really sitting down to think about, even if a lot of the set up in the first half can be laborious without an anchor character to center the reader.