The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

"You speak as if that were some kind of general moral imperative." He looked at Orr with his genial, reflective smile, stroking his beard. "But in fact, isn't that man's very purpose on earth--to do things, change things, run things, make a better world?"

"No!"

"What is his purpose, then?"

"I don't know. Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass."

Like most people, George Orr has bad dreams. But unlike most people, George's dreams come true: he imagines the death of his abusive aunt, and suddenly she has died in a car wreck. Not dies, has died: as soon as George emerges from the dream he knows that his aunt has been dead for several weeks; his dreams have literally change not just the future but the past, and no one remembers but him. In George memory has a doubleness; he remembers both what happened in this new timeline and the one from before his dreams. Distraught, he tries to keep himself from dreaming through pharmaceutical means, but his abuse of drugs lands him in the hand of a court-appointed therapist, Dr. Haber, who believes he can use George's abilities to create a better world.

My favorite scene in The Lathe of Heaven, I think, is when Dr. Haber, experimenting with his many dream-inducing machines, instructs a hypnotized George to dream of something innocuous: a horse. When George awakes, the mural of Mt. Hood on Haber's wall has become a portrait of a horse. It's a neat little moment of shock, dealt with organically in a way that's almost like a jump cut from a horror movie. Things escalate from there, with each of Haber's attempts at fixing the world having strange and grotesque consequences: by instructing George to make the world less overcrowded, he kills off billions in a plague. By instructing him to make the world peaceful, he conjures up an alien invasion--aliens that turn out to look like giant sea turtles. By instructing him to eliminate racial prejudice, he makes everyone a shade of even gray.

I don't think it was Le Guin's intention, but there's a conservative streak to The Lathe of Heaven: a belief that the best intentions of liberal reformers will always have unintended consequences that are worse than the problems they try to solve. Interestingly, Lathe has mixed success in diagnosing what humanity's problems will be. For 1971, the depiction of a world ravaged by the greenhouse effect is frighteningly prescient. But the belief that the world at seven billion people will be devastatingly overcrowded--she imagines a Portland of three million, with even larger cities emerging in Oregon's interior--looks like awfully silly Malthusian nonsense. Still, there is some wisdom in George's harried warning to Dr. Haber that the ends don't justify the means because "the means are all we have." What Le Guin understands is that the world is an unfolding process with no teleological end; utopian dreams of ending history will always be dreams, and not the kind that become real.

I read in Divine Invasions that Lathe was inspired by the Philip K. Dick novels of the 60's. Le Guin and Dick had a friendly correspondence, and that's not difficult to see here: the spineless subaltern whose dreams become real might have emerged directly from Dick's pages. The love interest, a spidery and abrasive woman named Heather Lalache, seems very "Phildickian" too. But I was struck by the process, outlined in Divine Invasions, by which Dick crafted a novel by smashing two separate ideas together, something that explains the sense of doubling and instability that characterizes his best work. Lathe is a classic, but it suffers in comparison to Dick's work, for me, because it really only has a single layer. And Dick never got caught up in the tedious technobabble that Le Guin writes whenever Dr. Haber starts talking about his dream machine, the Augmentor. I ended up tuning most of that stuff out. Still, Lathe speaks to a modern world that feels constantly on the edge of crisis, when one feels like solutions are simple but elusive.

Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin

There's no sea chart for a boat in a hurricane.  But there are still some basic ways to make her seaworthy and keep her from capsizing, going to pieces, or hitting an iceberg.

I didn't get as much out of Ursula K. Le Guin's book on writing, Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story, as I was hoping.  It's pretty narrowly focused, eschewing big questions about character and plot and worldmaking--the things I would really like to hear from Le Guin about--for discussions of real nuts-and-bolts stuff like point-of-view, tense, and repetition.  Now, don't get me wrong, I love that stuff, and it's a lot of what I focus on in my fiction writing class.  And maybe that's the problem: Le Guin's book is full of great, practical advice, but it's mostly stuff I already believe.

It was nice to hear, however, some of my own advice repeated back to me, like:

Particularly disturbing is the effect of being jerked into a different viewpoint for a moment.  With care, the involved author can do this (Tolkien does it with the fox).  But it cannot be done in limited third person.  If you're writing the story from Della's point of view, you can say, "Della looked up into Rodney's adoring face," but you can't say, "Della raised her incredibly beautiful violet eyes to Rodney's adoring face."  Though Della may be well aware that her eyes are violet and beautiful, she doesn't see them when she looks up.  Rodney sees them.

(Beginning writers do this literally all the time, and it's always just like this: a description of eyes, or a face, or a smile.)  Or:

Anton Chekhov gave some advice about revising a story: first, he said, throw out the first three pages.  As a young writer I figured that if anybody knew about short stories, it was Chekhov, so I tried taking his advice.  I really hoped he was wrong, but of course he was right.

The best section of the book, actually, is Le Guin's examples of the different kinds of point of view.  She tells one simple story, about a space princess who is anxious about her place in the kingdom and makes eye contact with a friendly face in a crowd, from several different points of view and the examples do a terrific job of showing how each affects the nature of the story.  I'm going to use those as examples in my class.  But the exercises she includes are not especially helpful and interesting, and though she includes a lot of really fascinating examples of authors using the tools she discusses--mostly, it turns out, Virginia Woolf--I would have liked to see them explicated or explored more.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

Though I had been nearly two years on Winter I was still far from being able to see the people of the planet through their own eyes.  I tried to, but my first efforts took the form of self-consciously seeing a Gethenian first as a man, then as a woman, forcing him into those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to my own.  Thus as I sipped my smoking sour beer I thought that at table Estraven's performance had been womanly, all charm and tact and lack of substance, specious and adroit.  Was it in fact perhaps this soft supple femininity that I disliked and distrusted in him?  For it was impossible to think of him as a woman, that dark, ironic, powerful presence near me in the firelit darkness, and yet whenever I thought of him as a man I felt a sense of falseness, of imposture: in him, or in my own attitude towards him?  His voice was soft and rather resonant but not deep, scarcely a man's voice, but scarcely a woman's voice either... but what was it saying?

Terrans, and the rest of the pan-galactic organization known as the Ekumen (from "ecumenical," no doubt) know the planet of Gethen as "Winter."  Here in New York, it's the regular kind of winter, and though we don't have -30 days, or dozens of words for the combinations of temperature and wind, or giant ice sheets, reading about this frozen world felt very of the right moment.  The Ekumen's envoy, Genly Ai, is never able to adjust to the bitter weather, which for Gethenians is merely a fact of life.

But the Gethenians pose far bigger challenges for Ai, as far as acclimation goes.  The Gethenians are the only race in the universe that don't share our typical notions of gender.  Instead of being split into male and female, the Gethenians are all one gender.  Once a month they go into a kind of estrus called kemmer, in which they are compelled to copulate with another Gethenian, and through sexual touching, one Gethenian basically sprouts male genitalia and the other female genitalia.  In this way Gethenians can either bear children or, for lack of a better word, "father" them.  Ai is amused, for example, when the king of the nation of Karhide announces that he is pregnant.

The Left Hand of Darkness is everything that I was hoping Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice would be: a thoughtful meditation on the contours of sex and gender by way of speculative fiction.  The kemmer process bears its weight on Gethenian culture, in the same way that sex bears its weight on ours.  Or, it might be better to say that Gethenian culture is defined by the absence of the sexual impulse and the lack of a gender-based dualism:

Consider: A child has no psycho-sexual relationship to his mother and father.  There is no myth of Oedipus on Winter.

Consider: There is no unconsenting sex, no rape.  As with most mammals other than man, coitus can be performed only by mutual invitation and consent; otherwise it is not possible.  Seduction certainly is possible, but it must have to be awfully well timed.

Consider: There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive.  In fact the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be lessened, or changed, on Winter.

Ai's task is to convince the various nations of Gethen to join the Ekumen, a loose collective of planets who share their knowledge with each other.  The challenge, of course, is that Ai has difficulty communicating with Gethenians because they are so different from him, and vice versa.  The king, having granted Ai an audience, wants to know if it's true that he's a "pervert" who's basically in kemmer all the time.  How do you convince a people to join you if you can barely see eye to eye about the basic structures of human life?

Ai gets caught up in some international intrigue between Karhide and its neighbor and rival, Orgoreyn.  (In this way The Left Hand of Darkness does something rare in science fiction: it conceives of a planet not as a single cultural and political bloc, like most books do as a matter of convenience, but as a collection of nation-states like our own.  Le Guin's worldbuilding is especially impressive when you realize that she's thought out not just the way that the absence of gender affects one culture, but two.)  He ends up throwing his lot in with an exiled Karhidish nobleman, Estraven, whom he does not trust, but they end up having to endure an eight-hundred mile march across a frozen ice sheet to escape from their captors in Orgoreyn.  It's during this journey that Ai learns to see through the eyes of his companion and vice versa, even coming close to falling in love with him, or her, or however you want to say it.

Like Orson Scott Card's Ender books, The Left Hand of Darkness is really about empathy: the difficulty, but necessity, of looking through eyes that are not your own, and recognizing a common humanity.  Unlike Card, it seems that Le Guin was exactly the kind of person who put those difficult principles into practice.  The Left Hand of Darkness is as gripping as it is thought-provoking, and all the encomia for it that appeared after Le Guin's recent death are richly deserved.