<
https://lithub.com/kelly-link-in-praise-of-ursula-k-le-guins-genuine-magic/>
"Originally,
The Lathe of Heaven appeared in two installments in
Amazing
Stories, a pulp magazine started in 1926 by Hugo Gernsback. Ursula Le Guin,
born in 1929, read
Amazing Stories as a child and would go on to outlive
almost all the science fiction pulp magazines. While many of the writers
Gernsback introduced to the field have fallen out of fashion and been
forgotten, Le Guin’s influence has expanded beyond all original bounds of
genre, appropriately so, as her writing was profoundly slippery, generous,
shape-shifting, and outreaching from the very start.
The Lathe of Heaven has the feel of a fable, part fairy tale, part
philosophical and psychological exploration of questions central to much of Le
Guin’s work: What are the consequences of working for change, even with the
best of intentions? What is the cost of utopia? What is the use and meaning of
dreams? The protagonist, George Orr, changes the world in dreaming. He is
frightened by this power, which he does not control consciously, but his
therapist, Dr. Haber, seeks to harness his power to make a better world.
It’s a novel with very few characters, the sort of narrative I can’t help but
imagine as a kind of black box theater performance, and
The Lathe of Heaven
was, in fact, twice made into a movie (Le Guin’s contemporary, the artist Ed
Emshwiller, served as a visual consultant to the first adaptation, which is
perhaps the only faithful adaptation of any of Le Guin’s work). It is also,
notably, Le Guin’s deliberate foray into Philip K. Dick’s territory, with its
hallucinatory beginning, its drug-using protagonist, and its surreal, literally
world-melting alternate realities. Dick and Le Guin were admirers of each
other’s work and occasional correspondents.
They had attended the same high school at the same time, though in a detail
once again straight out of a Dick novel, neither Le Guin nor any of her high
school class could afterward recall him in any of their classes or circles. I
would argue that
The Lathe of Heaven is also in conversation with the work of
Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon was one of the first writers to introduce
psychological realism into science fiction, exploring not only outer space but
also the frontiers inside the human mind. Le Guin admired Sturgeon’s writing,
and Sturgeon reviewed
The Lathe of Heaven for the
New York Times."
Via Kenny Chaffin.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
