Ursula K. Le Guin's 'The Lathe of Heaven' on its Fiftieth Anniversary

Ursula K. Le Guin’s novels defy classification as to whether they are speculative fiction or simply literary fantasy—her exquisite prose creating rich tapestries, surreal dreams of plot and character, woven with fierce threads of social and philosophic commentary.

The Lathe of Heaven was published in 1971, following her blockbuster success with her 1969 novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, but Le Guin’s writing career began in the late 1950’s, strongly influenced by cultural anthropology, Taoism, feminism, and the writings of Carl Jung.

The title, The Lathe of Heaven, is taken from the writings of Chuang Tzu (Zhuang Zhou), 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.”

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."

Regardless of the misinterpretation of the original text, the title stands as a singularly powerful concept.

The Lathe of Heaven

The story is set in Portland, Oregon, in 2002, in a world devastated by global warming, poverty due to overpopulation, and Middle East wars. The protagonist, George Orr, is a draftsman who abuses drugs in an attempt to stifle his ability to dream—he has discovered, to his abject terror, that when he dreams “effective” dreams, they alter reality; however, he is the only one who recalls the previous reality. Because of his illegal drug abuse, he is forced to undergo “voluntary” psychiatric care under a psychiatrist and sleep specialist named William Haber. Haber discovers that he can influence George’s dreams and becomes a type of puppet master over him, manipulating reality to “save the world”, but also enhance Haber’s wealth and status. Under Haber’s machine, the Augmentor, he uses George’s power to “do good” but he cannot control George’s dreams, and bizarre, twisted realities ensue. George realizes Haber’s dubious plan and enlists a lawyer, Heather Lelache, to represent him against Haber’s scheme, with limited success as reality continues to be altered, including her own existence.

The Left Hand of Darkness: 50th Anniversary Edition (Ace Science Fiction)

By Le Guin, Ursula K.

The novel was initially serialized in the American science fiction magazine Amazing Stories. The novel received nominations for the 1971 Nebula Award, the 1972 Hugo, and won the Locus Award for Best Novel in 1972. The novel was adapted to film by PBS and released in 1980 with Le Guin involved in the production of the adaptation. A second adaptation was released in 2002; however discarding a significant portion of the story.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Born Ursula Kroeber in Berkeley, California, 1929, she grew up on the Pacific Coast, immersed in anthropologic worlds through her father, tales handed down through her family, and classic literature. Le Guin graduated from Radcliffe in 1951, married historian Charles Le Guin in 1953 and they had three children, Elisabeth, Caroline, and Theodore. In 1959, the family settled in Portland as their permanent residence.

During an interview with Mark Wilson, Le Guin discusses her early influences: “Once I learned to read, I read everything. I read all the famous fantasies – Alice in Wonderland, and Wind in the Willows, and Kipling. I adored Kipling's Jungle Book. And then when I got older I found Lord Dunsany. He opened up a whole new world – the world of pure fantasy. And ... Worm Ouroboros. Again, pure fantasy. Very, very fattening. And then my brother and I blundered into science fiction when I was 11 or 12. Early Asimov, things like that. But that didn't have too much effect on me. It wasn't until I came back to science fiction and discovered Sturgeon – but particularly Cordwainer Smith. ...I read the story Alpha Ralpha Boulevard, and it just made me go, "Wow! This stuff is so beautiful, and so strange, and I want to do something like that."

In the 1960s, Le Guin found her voice through science fiction, publishing her first novel, A Wizard of Earthsea in 1966. By 1970, she had won the Hugo and Nebula awards for The Left Hand of Darkness [1969] an exquisite novel exploring gender and the concept of “otherness”. In the year following, Robert Heinlein published his novel, I Will Fear No Evil [1970] exploring male and female sexuality, but he never crossed the boundary into the deconstruction of gender like Le Guin's brilliant concept in The Left Hand of Darkness—the idea that gender is not absolute, but ephemeral. Jo Walton at Tor Books wrote a lovely article on The Left Hand of Darkness and Le Guin: Gender and glacier: Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness

With multiple awards in her literary career, Le Guin is considered one of the greatest speculative fiction writers of all time. Over her career, she received numerous accolades, including eight Hugos, six Nebulas, and twenty-two Locus Awards, and in 2003 became the second woman honored as a Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. In 2000, the U.S. Library of Congress named her a Living Legend, and she won the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014. Le Guin has influenced many other authors, including Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, David Mitchell, Neil Gaiman, and Iain Banks. After her death in 2018, critic John Clute wrote that Le Guin had "presided over American science fiction for nearly half a century", and author Michael Chabon referred to her as the "greatest American writer of her generation".

Ursula K. Le Guin, photo credit Jack Liu

In 2016, Julie Phillips wrote a superb article on Le Guin for the New Yorker: The Fantastic Ursula K. Le Guin, including an intimate conversation with Le Guin at her Portland home.

Le Guin died on January 22, 2018 at the age of 88, but her literary heritage will continue to influence, be it bur or spur, on our society. I leave you with a prescient quote from Ursula K. Le Guin in 2014:

“I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries – the realists of a larger reality.”

—Ursula K. Le Guin

Many thanks to Wikipedia for background of Ursula K. Le Guin and to interviewers: Mark Wilson, Jo Walton of TOR, and writer Julie Phillips, contributor to The New Yorker.

K.E. Lanning, author of THE MELT TRILOGY: A Spider Sat Beside Her, The Sting of the Bee, and Listen to the Birds; and her upcoming novel: Where the Sky Meets the Earth.

This article was also published on FUTURISM on January 7, 2021.

Author K.E. Lanning Interview on PBS for The Melt Trilogy

Sharing a novel with readers is one of the best parts of being an author! I was privileged to be asked by my local PBS station to do an interview for The Melt Trilogy: A Spider Sat Beside Her, The Sting of the Bee, and Listen to the Birds. So gentle readers, without further ado, here’s the interview which first aired on 1/14/2020:

Rose Martin of Write Around the Corner Interviews author K.E. Lanning. First aired on January 14, 2020 on Blue Ridge PBS

I hope you enjoy it, and please forward as you will! Link url: https://www.pbs.org/video/write-around-the-corner-k-e-lanning-x8easy/

Now I have to get back to finishing my next novel, Where the Sky Meets the Earth - my editor awaits!

Best wishes for 2020 and welcome to a new decade!

K.E. Lanning

Review of Author Margaret Atwood's "The Testaments"

Master Puppeteer of Dystopian Theater

“Praise be!” It has been thirty-four years since the controversial, and even banned novel, The Handmaid’s Tale was published (1985), and on September 10, 2019, Margaret Atwood published its sequel, The Testaments. Her latest novel has already garnered critical praise and was named to the shortlist for the Booker Prize.

In The Testaments, her characters bear witness to the inevitable corruption of power in the totalitarian regime of Gilead. Extreme societies tend to end extremely, and as phrased succinctly by Gilead's Aunt Lydia: “In time like ours, there are only two directions: up or plummet.”

The Handmaid’s Tale introduced us to the country of Gilead—a nation based on strict theocracy, and though the interlude has been long, the final act of the play is The Testaments, in which we observe the increasingly corrupt machinations of a state, or perhaps a twisted royal court, which hasn’t as yet recognized its internal wounds, bleeding away the strength of its original “truths.”

Margaret Atwood, born in Ottawa, Canada in 1939, knew by the age of sixteen that writing would be her profession. Atwood graduated in 1961 with a Bachelor’s degree in English from Victoria College in the University of Toronto, and in 1962, received a Master’s Degree from Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA. In 1961, she won the E.J. Pratt Medal for her book of poems, Double Persephone. Atwood has also been a writer of feminist works such as The Edible Woman, published in 1969.

As a novelist, Atwood is a master puppeteer of dystopian theater, pulling the strings of character and scene on a macabre stage of her choosing. But her repertoire is not limited by time nor subject—she’s exquisitely adept at her craft—a frankly stunning career of writing—not only of speculative fiction like The Handmaid’s Tale and the MaddAddam Trilogy, but with novels such as Alias Grace, based on the true story of an infamous double murder in Canada during the nineteenth century.

Her latest novel, The Testaments, is told in an epistolary style via three points of view: Aunt Lydia, arguably the most powerful woman in Gilead; Agnes, a young coming-of-age woman in Gilead—a perilous journey in this male dominated sphere; and Daisy, a teenager living in Canada, who is everything that Agnes is not—but with a secret, and infamous, past.

Atwood's delicious character development is especially effective with Aunt Lydia, a central figure in The Handmaid’s Tale. Now in The Testaments, we see her fleshed out, discovering who she was before the rise of Gilead. In a reflective passage by Aunt Lydia, she asks herself:

“How will I end? I wondered. Will I live to a gently neglected old age, ossifying by degrees? Will I become my own honored statue? Or will the regime and I both topple and my stone replica along with me, to be dragged away and sold off as a curiosity, a lawn ornament, a chunk of gruesome kitsch?

Or will I be put on trial as a monster, then executed by a firing squad and dangled from a lamppost for public viewing? Will I be torn apart by a mob and have my head stuck on a pole and paraded through the streets to merriment and jeers? I have inspired sufficient rage for that.”

Her character Agnes, a young woman of Gilead, grapples with the twists and turns of political and social intrigue: “And this is not heaven. This is a place of snakes and ladders, and though I was once high up on the ladder propped against the Tree of Life, now I’ve slide down a snake.”

As the story unfolds, we are introduced to the character of Daisy, a teenager trying to unearth her mysterious past, finding herself vulnerable and confused as she parses her fate: “The world was no longer solid and dependable, it was porous and deceptive.”

Atwood leads us to the conclusion of this terrifying fictional world of Gilead, but as the curtain falls and the crowd disperses from the theater, what real world do we encounter through the exit doors?

In times of turmoil, we humans rush to elusive havens advertising peace and prosperity. But we must be on guard—perhaps the carny at the gate is simply fooling us with a ‘switch and bait’ in which we give away hard won freedoms for false promises. A timely and poignant line from The Testaments: “How much of belief comes from longing?”

This review was initially published on FUTURISM.

K.E. Lanning is the author of THE MELT TRILOGY: A Spider Sat Beside Her, The Sting of the Bee, and Listen to the Birds

SUBSCRIBE TO K.E. LANNING TO RECEIVE BLOG ARTICLES AND AUTHOR UPDATES

What if the ice caps melted . . . in one human lifespan?

Deep Break

“Deep Break” is an antiquated method of plowing when the soil is overturned and exposed in the early spring to ready the soil for new growth. As I construct my work-in-progress, Where the Sky Meets the Earth, I, too, dig for roots deep in history to create my novel, gathering research to develop both plot and character.

Where the Sky Meets the Earth is a work of literary fiction delving into the consequences of the recent economic fallout entangled with a perceived second coming of a messiah (think a twist on Stranger in a Strange Land set during the Great Recession). A nuclear family has exploded—unemployment, opioid addiction, and divorce. The son, a fourteen-year-old mixed-race boy, disappears into the mountains of Wyoming, seeking a true way of living.

Preliminary cover art

In order to weave a complex story such as this, it takes hours of sifting through threads of history; research on the causes of the Great Recession and the impact on the lives of ordinary people. In order to build the Arapaho shaman character who becomes the lightning rod at the center of the story, I read indigenous history books such as The Wisdom of the Native Americans and In the Hands of the Great Spirit.

But a book that truly resonated with me was an incredible work by Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, published initially in Hebrew (2011), then in English in 2014. This is a stunning book on the anthropology of homo sapiens, and various competitor humanoids, up to the present time. This is not a dry rendition, it is filled with Harari’s philosophical spin on the effects of capitalism, government, and religion.

I was particularly interested in researching the hunter/gatherer period before homo sapiens became trapped into the agricultural revolution, which begs the speculative question—how would society look if that leap hadn’t occurred? And as my novel will attempt to reveal—what if a new messiah led us back to the hunter/gatherer life—turning away from modern society?

K.E. Lanning is the author of THE MELT TRILOGY: A Spider Sat Beside Her, The Sting of the Bee, and Listen to the Birds

SUBSCRIBE TO K.E. LANNING TO RECEIVE BLOG ARTICLES AND AUTHOR UPDATES

What if the ice caps melted . . . in one human lifespan?