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A review by daumari
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
adventurous
hopeful
reflective
tense
4.0
Rereading for Biere Library Storytime Book club!
It was fascinating coming back to this after a decade living in Oregon (I moved about four months after I initially read Lathe of Heaven on a roadtrip when visiting my then-long distance boyfriend. For such a short novel Ursula really packs a bunch, with prescient (though maybe evergreen where some issues are still issues that haven't been resolved) vision for what the near-future 40 years from publication would look like. I have a bit more sense of the location now that I've spent more time in Portland, with Mount Hood looming as a tertiary character showing just how much things change under Helms' directions to George Orr.
Portland may not have a subway, but you can open the papers to read about unrest in the middle east, as climate change affects cities. The most situationally ironic thing to me was when characters look at mountains in the Portland skyline, they occasionally mention the serene, dormant cone of Mount Saint Helen which in actuality it violently erupted in 1980.Mount Hood is the one that erupts here, and who's to say other ring of fire cones won't in the future?
Original 2013 review:
A man who can change reality through 'effective dreaming' under the influence of a psychologist who wants to fix everything? Recipe for a absorbing but very short read. Written in the early 70s but set approximately around the early 2000s, recommended for fans of dystopian examinations into can humans really fix things/should we have the power to do so/etc.
It was fascinating coming back to this after a decade living in Oregon (I moved about four months after I initially read Lathe of Heaven on a roadtrip when visiting my then-long distance boyfriend. For such a short novel Ursula really packs a bunch, with prescient (though maybe evergreen where some issues are still issues that haven't been resolved) vision for what the near-future 40 years from publication would look like. I have a bit more sense of the location now that I've spent more time in Portland, with Mount Hood looming as a tertiary character showing just how much things change under Helms' directions to George Orr.
Portland may not have a subway, but you can open the papers to read about unrest in the middle east, as climate change affects cities. The most situationally ironic thing to me was when characters look at mountains in the Portland skyline, they occasionally mention the serene, dormant cone of Mount Saint Helen which in actuality it violently erupted in 1980.
Original 2013 review:
A man who can change reality through 'effective dreaming' under the influence of a psychologist who wants to fix everything? Recipe for a absorbing but very short read. Written in the early 70s but set approximately around the early 2000s, recommended for fans of dystopian examinations into can humans really fix things/should we have the power to do so/etc.