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.