The Lathe of Heaven

The Lathe of Heaven is a 1971 science fiction novel by Ursula K. Le Guin. The plot revolves around a character whose dreams alter reality. The story was first serialized in the American science fiction magazine Amazing Stories. The novel received nominations for the 1972 Hugo and the 1971 Nebula Award, and won the Locus Award for Best Novel in 1972. Two television film adaptations have been released: the acclaimed PBS production, The Lathe of Heaven (1980); and Lathe of Heaven (2002), a remake produced by the A&E Network.

Title
The title is taken from the writings of Chuang Tzu — specifically a passage from Book XXIII, paragraph 7, quoted as an epigraph to Chapter 3 of the novel:

"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. (知止乎其所不能知，至矣. 若有不即是者，天鈞敗之. )"

Other epigraphs from Chuang Tzu appear throughout the novel. Le Guin chose the title because she loved the quotation. However, it seems that the quote is a mistranslation of Chuang Tzu's Chinese text. In an interview with Bill Moyers recorded for the 2000 DVD release of the 1980 adaptation, Le Guin clarified the issue:

"...it's a terrible mistranslation apparently, I didn't know that at the time. There were no lathes in China at the time that that was said. Joseph Needham wrote me and said 'It's a lovely translation, but it's wrong'."

She has published her own translations of the Tao Te Ching, The Book of the Way and Its Virtue by Lao Tzu, the traditional founder of Taoism (Daoism). In the notes at the end of this book, she further explains this choice: "The language of some [versions of the Tao Te Ching] was so obscure as to make me feel the book must be beyond Western comprehension. (James Legge's version was one of these, though I did find the title for a book of mine, The Lathe of Heaven, in it. Years later, Joseph Needham, the great scholar of Chinese science and technology, wrote to tell me in the kindest, most unreproachful fashion that Legge was a bit off on that one; when the book [Tao Te Ching] was written the lathe hadn't been invented.)"

Translated editions have titled the novel differently. The German title, Die Geißel des Himmels, means literally "the scourge [or whip] of heaven". The French and Swedish titles, L'autre côté du rêve and På andra sidan drömmen, translate as "the other side of the dream".

Plot summary


The book is set in Portland, Oregon in the year 2002. Portland has three million inhabitants and continuous rain. It is deprived enough for the poorer inhabitants to have kwashiorkor, or protein-deprivation. The culture is much the same as the 1970s in the United States, though impoverished. There is also a massive war in the Middle East, with Egypt and Israel allied against Iran.

George Orr, a draftsman, has long been abusing drugs to prevent himself from having "effective" dreams, which retroactively change reality. After having one of these dreams, the new reality is the only reality for everyone else, but George retains memory of the previous reality. Under threat of being placed in an asylum, Orr is forced to undergo "voluntary" psychiatric care for his drug abuse.

George begins attending therapy sessions with an ambitious psychiatrist and sleep researcher named William Haber. Orr claims that he has the power to dream "effectively" and Haber seeks to use it to change the world. His experiments with a biofeedback/EEG machine, nicknamed the Augmentor, enhance Orr's abilities and produce a series of increasingly intolerable alternate worlds, based on an assortment of utopian (and dystopian) premises familiar from other science fiction works:
 * When Haber directs George to dream a world without racism, the skin of everyone on the planet becomes a uniform light gray.
 * An attempt to solve the problem of overpopulation proves disastrous when George dreams a devastating plague which wipes out much of humanity and gives the current world a population of one billion rather than seven billion.
 * George attempts to dream into existence "peace on Earth" – resulting in an alien invasion of the Moon which unites all the nations of Earth against the threat.

Each effective dream gives Haber more wealth and status, until late in the book where he is effectively ruler of the world. Orr's economic status also improves, but he is unhappy with Haber's meddling and just wants to let things be. Increasingly frightened by Haber's lust for power and delusions of Godhood, Orr seeks out a lawyer named Heather to represent him against Haber. Heather is present at one therapeutic session, and comes to understand George's situation. He falls in love with Heather, and even marries her in one reality; however, he is unsuccessful in getting out of therapy.

George tells Heather that the "real world" had been destroyed in a nuclear war in April 1998. George dreamed it back into existence as he lay dying in the ruins. He doubts the reality of what now exists, hence his fear of Haber's efforts to improve it. Heather has seen one change of reality and has a multiple memory – remembering that her pilot husband either died early in the Middle East War or else died just before the truce that ended the war in the face of the alien threat. She tries to help George but also tries to improve the world, saying that the aliens should no longer be on the Moon. George dreams this, but the result is that they have invaded the Earth instead. In the resultant fighting, Mount Hood is bombed and the dormant volcano starts to erupt again.

They go back to Haber, who has George dream another dream in which the aliens are actually peaceful. For a time there is stability, but Haber goes on changing things. His suggestion that George dream away racism results in everyone becoming gray; Heather, whose parents were of different races, never existed in this new reality. George manages to dream up a gray version of her, married to him and with a less prickly personality. Mount Hood continues to erupt and he fears the world is losing coherence.

Orr has a conversation with one of the aliens, suddenly comes to understand his situation, and thereby gains the courage to stand up to Haber. Haber, frustrated with Orr's resistance, uses what he has learned from studying George's brain during his sessions of hypnosis and controlled dreaming, and decides to take on effective dreaming himself. Haber's first effective dream represents a significant break with the realities created by Orr, and threatens to destroy reality altogether. Orr is able to shut off the Augmentor – even as coherent existence is dissolving into undifferentiated chaos – reaching the "off" switch through pure force of will. The world is saved, but random bits of the various recent realities are now jumbled together. Haber's mind is left broken. Heather, presumably her original self, exists, though with only a slight memory of George.

Viewpoints
Though technology plays a minor role, the novel is largely concerned with philosophical questions about our desire to control our destiny, with Haber's positivist approach pitted against a Taoist equanimity. The beginnings of the chapters also feature quotes from H. G. Wells, Victor Hugo and Taoist sages. Due to its portrayal of psychologically-derived alternate realities, it has often been described as Le Guin's tribute to Philip K. Dick. In his biography of Dick, Lawrence Sutin described Le Guin as having "long been a staunch public advocate of Phil's talent". According to Sutin, "The Lathe of Heaven was, by her own acknowledgment, markedly influenced by his [Dick's] sixties works." The book is critical of behaviorism. Orr, a deceptively mild yet very strong and honest man, is labeled sick because he is immensely frightened by his ability to change reality. He is forced to undergo therapy whether he wants to or not. His efforts to rid himself of Haber are viewed as suspect because he is a psychiatric patient. Haber, meanwhile, is very charming, extroverted, and confident, yet it is he who eventually goes insane and almost destroys reality. He dismisses Orr's qualms about meddling with reality with paternalistic psychobabble, and is more concerned with his machine and Orr's powers than with curing his patient.

The book is also critical of the philosophy of utilitarianism, satirising the phrase "The Greatest Happiness for the Greatest Number." It is highly critical of eugenics throughout and somewhat conflates it with utilitarianism in suggesting that it would be a key feature in a society which took the philosophy as its central doctrine.

Le Guin may have named her protagonist "George Orr" as an homage to British author George Orwell, as well as to draw comparisons between the dystopic worlds she describes in Lathe, and the dystopia Orwell envisioned in his novel 1984.

Adaptations
An adaptation entitled The Lathe of Heaven produced by the public television station WNET, and directed by David Loxton and Fred Barzyk, was released in 1980. It was PBS's first direct-to-TV film production and was produced with a budget of $ 250 000. Generally faithful to the novel, it stars Bruce Davison as George Orr, Kevin Conway as William Haber, and Margaret Avery as Heather LeLache. Ursula K. Le Guin herself was heavily involved in the production of the 1980 adaptation, and has several times expressed her satisfaction with it.

PBS' rights to rebroadcast the film expired in 1988, and it became the most-requested program in PBS history. Fans were extremely critical of WNET's supposed "warehousing" of the film, but the budgetary barriers to rebroadcast were high: the station needed to pay for and clear rights with all participants in the original program; negotiate a special agreement with the composer of the film's score; and deal with the Beatles recording excerpted in the original soundtrack, "With a Little Help from My Friends", which is an integral plot point in both the novel and the film. A cover version replaces the Beatles' own recording in the home video release.

The home video release is remastered from a video tape of the original broadcast; PBS, thinking the rights issues would dog the production forever, did not save a copy of the production in their archives.

A second adaptation was released in 2002 and retitled Lathe of Heaven. Produced for the A&E Network and directed by Philip Haas, the film starred James Caan, Lukas Haas, and Lisa Bonet. The 2002 adaptation discards a significant portion of the plot, some essential characters, and much of the philosophical underpinnings of the book and the original PBS production. Ursula K. Le Guin disapproved of the A&E production, and stated that she found it "misguided and uninteresting".

Publication history

 * Serialized
 * Amazing Science Fiction Stories, March 1971 and May 1971.
 * Editions in English
 * 1971, US, Charles Scribner's Sons, ISBN 0-684-12529-3, hardcover
 * 1971, US, Avon Books, ISBN 0-380-43547-0, paperback
 * 1972, UK, Victor Gollancz, ISBN 0-575-01385-0, hardcover
 * 1984, US, Avon Books, ISBN 0-380-01320-7, paperback (reprinted 1989)
 * 1984, UK, Granada Publishing, ISBN 0-586-03841-8, paperback
 * 1997, US, Avon Books, ISBN 0-380-79185-4, trade paperback
 * 2001, US, Millennium Books, ISBN 1-85798-951-1, paperback
 * 2003, US, Perennial Classics, ISBN 0-06-051274-1, paperback
 * 2008, US, Scribner, ISBN 1-4165-5696-6, paperback
 * Audio recording in English
 * 1999, US, Blackstone Audio Books, ISBN 0-7861-1471-1
 * Translations
 * 1971, France: L'autre côté du rêve, Marabout; reprinted in 2002 by Le Livre de Poche, ISBN 2-253-07243-5
 * 1974, Germany, Die Geißel des Himmels, Heyne, München, 1974, ISBN 3-453-30250-8
 * 1979, Sweden: På Andra Sidan Drömmen, Kindbergs Förlag, ISBN 91-85668-01-X
 * 1991, Finland: Taivaan työkalu, Book Studio, ISBN 951-611-408-3
 * 1992, Hungary: Égi eszterga, Móra, ISBN 963-11-6867-0
 * 1994, Czech republic: Smrtonosné sny, Ivo Železný, ISBN 80-7116-173-X
 * 1997, Russia: Резец небесный
 * 2005, Italy: La Falce dei cieli, Editrice Nord, ISBN 88-429-1360-X
 * 2010, Korea: 하늘의 물레.황금가지, ISBN 978-89-6017-242-5