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Cover of The Lathe of Heaven

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin

How in the world did Ursula K. LeGuin think that an Earth with seven billion people in it would be on the brink of starvation?

This is just one of the issues I had with one of LeGuin’s more well-known works, The Lathe of Heaven. It’s still an excellent read despite all these issues. George Orr is an ordinary man with a very weird problem. Sometimes his dreams come true. Not in the sense of prophetic dreams, but his subconscious somehow retcons the entire universe so the dream has always been true, since the dawn of time. Naturally Orr winds up referred to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist, Dr. William Haber, starts to manipulate Orr’s dreams for his own purposes…

Over the course of the book, Orr runs through a lot of universes, exploring a bunch of mostly dystopian science fiction ideas along the way. (Notice his name is a pun on George Orwell?)

At the beginning of the book, the year is 2002 and global warming has melted all the ice in the world, including Antarctica. This is even true in realities where the human population – and thus CO2 emissions – nosedive sometime in the 1970’s. In realities where the world’s population is still seven billion, the people of Portland are crammed in so tight they can barely move, and the state of Oregon has to build several more cities in the desert, each containing millions of people.

I can’t fault LeGuin for getting the details of global warming wrong, since this book was published in 1971. But she’s too smart to miscalculate how many people a world can physically hold. All one needs to figure that out is the square footage of a typical one-bedroom apartment, the square footage of the world’s urban areas, and some math.

Another objection I have is to Dr. Haber. The book’s meant to present a moral dilemma: How far would you go to make the world a better place? That’s a fine dilemma and one I’d like to see explored. Dr. Haber’s meant to be a sympathetic character who makes questionable choices. But in practice, Dr. Haber behaves so despicably that this book does not work for me as a dilemma.

I am a scientist. I have a thing about scientific ethics. And Dr. Haber blazes past the bounds of acceptable behavior within the first dozen pages. He is literally performing medical experimentation on an unwilling patient with no protocol, no control group, and no institutional oversight. And he’s stupid. When one of his experiments on Orr kills six billion people, does it occur to Dr. Haber that this project is dangerous and he should stop? No.

There’s merit to watching a monster version of my own profession in action. And Dr. Haber makes a great villain. But a moral dilemma he does not make. I want to see him squashed like a bug. (I found the end of the book quite satisfying, but I’ll leave the reader to discover the details on their own.)

The Lathe of Heaven is meant to critique utilitarian ethics. But like I said earlier, Dr. Haber inadvertently kills six billion people for the sake of the remaining one billion. Sacrificing the many for the sake of the few is far from a utilitarian ideal. One of LeGuin’s short stories, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” does a much better job of critiquing utilitarianism.

And LeGuin puts Taoist philosophy into characters’ mouths when they don’t have any in-universe reason to know these things.

But that’s enough ranting for now. Though I have all these objections to the book, at no point does LeGuin slip into shoddy writing. The book’s beautiful. And I disagree with it. And I like it when books bite back.

It’s wonderfully ambiguous what’s actually going on with Orr’s mind. There is a Blade-Runner-like blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment at the beginning of the book that changes everything.

All the universes Orr surfs through remind us how weird our universe is compared to what science fiction writers expected. We live in the world where the Soviet Union sort of evaporated in 1991. Where obesity now poses a greater worldwide health burden than undernutrition. Where Eastern Europe and Japan aren’t having enough babies. Where it’s 2015 and we still haven’t conquered space, but we’re still managing to do some really awesome things with it.

Cover of The Dispossessed

The Dispossessed by Ursula K LeGuin

The Dispossessed is the reason Ursula K. LeGuin became the first person ever to write a book that won both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards, twice. (Her first twofer was for The Left Hand of Darkness.) She earned it.

The book is circular on a lot of levels. The story deals with a binary system of planets, Urras and Anarres, that orbit the star Tau Ceti. The inhabitants of each planet see the other planet as the moon. Urras is a lush water planet with a capitalist society and a state-socialist society locked in a cold war with each other. (Sound familiar? The book was published in 1974.) Anarres is a desert world inhabited by the descendants of colonists who exiled themselves on the planet to found an anarcho-syndicalist utopia.

I didn’t know anarcho-syndicalism existed until I started reading. It’s sort of like rule by a federation of trade unions. Sort of, but not exactly. The examination of these three societies makes the book a morality play on an epic scale, which shouldn’t work, but it does.

The main character is Shevek, an Anarresti physicist who travels to Urras after the planets have been isolated from each other for 170 years. In alternating chapters the book tells of Shevek’s adventures on Urras and his backstory on Anarres that led to his decision to make the trip. At the end of the book, Shevek returns to Anarres at the same time that he decides to leave Anarres for Urras. Circular.

Often, LeGuin would meet my objections to how Anarresti society would work just after I thought of them.

Me: How does a hermit society like Anarres do physics?

LeGuin: Yes, that’s the problem.

Me: But this isn’t really an anarchy! The government’s just very small and decentralized.

LeGuin: Yes, and it’s getting bigger.

I have some other issues with the text that LeGuin didn’t address. Why don’t Anarresti people work themselves sick, for instance? There’s always too much work to do just to survive in the planet’s harsh climate. Anarresti are taught from childhood that work is the noblest thing a person can do with their time. But it says in the text that they have a six-hour workday. Maybe they don’t take weekends.

Since there’s no central court of justice, rapists and murderers have to face the wrath of their neighbors. Regardless of how comfortable you are with vigilante justice, what if the community is wrong about who did it? What if they are really, truly convinced they have the culprit, and he didn’t do it?

I also don’t think it was entirely sporting of LeGuin to make the capitalist society the worst capitalist society that could possibly exist. A-io is only a few steps away from being a medieval feudal society with spaceships.

But all these are quibbles. The descriptions of place are gorgeous, and this book will make you think. Hard. And that’s the best kind of science fiction.