The Classification of a Legend: The Queen Mother of Science Fiction
Usually I find classifying books somewhat detrimental to their enjoyment. But when encountering an author like Ursula K. Le Guin, finding where modern bookstores choose to shelve her work can be an adventure. Le Guin has specifically classified this particular work, The Lathe of Heaven as a work of science fiction, meaning she would surely frown if she stumbled across it in the Fantasy section. Le Guin herself eloquently defines science fiction in these terms in an interview by Seth Fried with Vice Magazine,
This distinction makes most sense to me … science fiction . . . uses actual scientific facts or theories for the source ideas or framework of the story. It has some scientific content, however speculative. If it breaks a law of physics, it knows it’s doing so and follows up the consequences. If it invents a society of aliens, it does so with some respect for and knowledge of the social sciences and what you might call social probabilities. And some of it is literarily self-aware enough to treat its metaphors as metaphors.I would have to whole heartedly agree. Her book is very much based upon the science of dreaming with one key fictional element, Orr’s dreams become reality. Not in some deja vu or psychic way either, he can alter reality with his dreams. The book was published in 1971 but the story is set in Portland, Oregon in the future year, 2002. While the publication I am working from is bundled neatly into 184 pages by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc, the piece was originally serialized in the science fiction rag, Amazing Stories. The world we learn about within its pages is no longer our future, yet an all too near past, and some of its tales are too close for comfort, a war in the Middle East, severe global warming, over-population, world hunger, etc. The threat of nuclear holocaust seems more likely than an alien invasion, but if it’s only one message a reader walks away with from The Lathe of Heaven, it’s that all that we see and all that we seem just may be a dream within a dream.
While my wit usually equips me with the words for entertaining, amusing yet accurate critiques, my absolute devotion to the author, Ursula K. Le Guin and her predecessor Philip K. Dick and my love for the “sf” genre itself are pushing me towards a careful analysis of Le Guin’s purposeful use of the genre and her creation of the anti-hero, George Orr. I argue that the use of science fiction is to disarm its readers of preconceived notions in order to get down to core issues without previous bias and prejudices. She creates in George a character readers can easily relate to and empathize with allowing a natural, gradual following of his journey through the pages.
The Dream Within a Dream: An Unfolding of Events
The story begins with George Orr near death from radiation poisoning and being pinned under concrete after a nuclear war has destroyed most of the living organisms on Earth, as George lay dying he is suddenly sitting on the cement steps with a dandelion, a breathe glimpse of life, by his hand. The story then jumps to George being accused of over dosing on drugs he realizes he has been taking to suppress his dreams. It is tempting to believe George’s experience of near death is simply a bad dream, however as he is committed to Voluntary Therapy we learn that is not the case at all.
At Voluntary Therapy George is introduced to Dr. William Haber who he attempts to open up to about his “effective dreaming.” To explain his “ability” George recounts the story of his first memory of effective dreaming to Dr. Haber. George’s Aunt Ethel had been staying with his family while going through a divorce when he was the impressionable age of 17. She would come on to him and the tension was becoming way too much for his young psyche to deal with. He dreamed she had been in a horrible car accident. He awoke the next morning to learn she had never stayed with them, but had died in an accident after leaving her divorce attorney’s office weeks earlier. George’s dream had changed reality. Haber, an accomplished dream specialist (an oneirologist) while intrigued does not believe George at first. Haber is not a detestable man, and in one short paragraph he sums his own character up:
I frequently daydream heroics. I am the hero. I’m saving the girl . . . or the whole damn planet. Messiah dreams, do-gooder dreams. Haber saves the world! We all need that ego boost we get from daydreams, but when we start relying on it, then our reality-parameters are getting a bit shaky (Le Guin 33).George becomes convinced Haber believes him because while in d-state, he has George replace a painting he had originally changed in a previous dream session. With Haber’s Dream Machine, or the Augmentor, Haber begins to use George’s ability to carry out his own daydreams of grand heroics. First he has George dream of a sunny day in Portland, Oregon, a place that has been under constant rainfall and grey cast skies which is a start down a very slippery slope for Haber.
The next part of the novel focuses on George trying to get away from Haber who has grown increasingly dependent upon George’s “effective dreaming.” No longer does George attend session in a windowless office located in the interior of an obscure office building. Instead he visits Dr. Haber at the Oregon Oneirological Institute. George enlists the aid of civil rights attorney Heather Lelache who finds an excuse to witness one of George’s sessions at the Institute to see for herself what rights, if any of George, Haber was violating. Together, Haber and Lelache witness the outcome of one of George’s most horrific effective dreams. In order to control the over-population problem suggested by Haber in his d-state, George dreams about a horrible plague that wipes out six sevenths of the worlds population. Haber faces the truth, for the first time, that he has been using George, “This whole day, from his arrival at work on, he had not given one thought to the fact that, a week ago, he had not been the Director of the Oregon Oneirologoical Institute, because there had been no Institute” (63). He resolves to continue with his self-righteous path of saving the world and he plans to do it with George or without.
The rest of the novel spirals interlocking realities in true Philip K. Dick form. In order to get peace on Earth, George dreams of an alien invasion of the moon causing the leading warring nations to unite under the new threat. Heather Lelache, who George has fallen in love with, tries to help by suggesting to George in d-state that the aliens have left the moon. When they awake, the aliens are on their way to Earth. This is quickly resolved by suggesting the aliens are peaceful beings. They become store owners and hot dog stand operators. Haber thinks he can solve the problem of racism, by suggesting to George to get rid of race. Everyone is the same color of grey and in a way, George realizes a charm of the human race is gone. Imagine all the flowers of the world being the same color. No more Martin Luther King, great inspirational stories of fighting oppression, personal identities forever altered.
George the Jellyfish and Anti-hero: Who Still Ends Up With the Girl
Just like the jelly fish, George gives when he has to give and hangs when he has to hang. Heroes and martyrs die. But the rest of us have to survive. If we can agree on one thing in respect to Ursula’s character George, is that for one brief second, due to the mysterious gift bestowed to him, he gave mankind a second chance. He didn’t steer it this way or that, just simply gave the human race life. After near total nuclear destruction he dreamed a world where mother nature had another go, symbolized by the flower peeking through the concrete ground. I argue that this dream came naturally, as natural as any organism using whatever means to survive, and in George’s case, dreaming he and human kind were still alive just so happened to make it so.
By portraying George in such a passive manner through out the majority of the novel, Le Guin wants us to take notice when George the jellyfish, stands up to Haber in this poignant moment in the novel,
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 a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are (82).It is in this vain, I leave out the end of the novel. To Le Guin, the end is not nearly as important as the journey. The message of the novel is not nearly as important as the exercise of critical thinking that goes into reading it. Le Guin wanted a new character who became a part of the flux, rather than one who tried to dam things up and control the chaos. It is a new way of thinking of things, one that is second nature to George. He hopes to be reunited with Heather and in going with the flow of things, ends up with her.
Science Fiction as a Means Not an End
Perhaps my initial pause in classifying her work is the stigma science fiction carries. Somehow Philip K. Dick’s Ubik falls lower on the literary totem pole than Eric Arthur Blair’s Nineteen Eighty-Four which is cleverly classified as literary political fiction, with the subgenre of social science fiction. I mention the first piece because Le Guin draws heavily from the reality-in-flux Dick sets up in his novels, particularly Ubik. In Ubik, the character Pat Conley can change reality by changing past events. The novel’s ever changing reality spirals leaving the characters and the readers wondering which reality is the “real” reality, an element Le Guin is no doubt attempting to achieve.
Le Guin’s protagonist in The Lathe of Heaven George Orr is most undoubtedly named after Blair’s pen name George Orwell. The way Orwell proposes a world, in the future, without certain liberties because of government control was a way to delicately bring up core issues without coming out and accusing actual leaders of the time. Again, Le Guin sees this as a way for the non-political to think critically without being badgered into any particular political and social corner. I would like to make the point that finding yourself amidst a group of Sci-Fi nerds intent on “geeking out” is as intense and overwhelming as attending a Harvard Alumni event honoring George Orwell. Both sides of the coin are laden with chances for real debate on important issues relevant in any circle.
In following the science of dreaming as closely as she can, Le Guin maintains some scientific credibility building trust with the reader. She then flips the switch so to say, to a world only understandable by the reader’s willingness to suspend his or her own belief of the dimensions of reality. If you are willing to accept this initial flip, you will be more readily willing to see previous social, political and socioeconomic issues under different lights, even the bright lights of alien space ships.
Works Cited
Dick, Philip K. Ubik. New York: Vintage, 1991. Print.
Fried, By Seth. "URSULA K. LE GUIN." Vice Magazine. Dec. 2008. Web. 21 Dec.
2010.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Lathe of Heaven: a Novel. New York: Scribner, 2008. Print.
Moyers, Bill, comp. The Lathe of Heaven (Film, DVD Bonus Material). 2000. Interview
with Ursula K. Le Guin.