Book Review: The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

A classic of science fiction and a powerful reminder of how much progress we've made since the 1970s

The Lathe of Heaven

Classic sci-fi and fantasy maestro Ursula K. Le Guin is perhaps best known for her Hainish Cycle and Earthsea series, but my favorite of her works¹ is a standalone book: The Lathe of Heaven, first published in 1971. I first came across a tattered copy in the impromptu library of the Kianjavato Ahmanson Field Station in the eastern forests of Madagascar, part of a collection of literature donated by previous volunteer research assistants, and it was a truly delightful read. Somehow, this book manages to be a catalogue of 1970s-era worries about social and environmental catastrophe, a Taoism-inspired philosophical meditation on the nature of reality, a suspenseful page-turning read, and on top of all that a counterintuitively comforting and reassuring reminder of how human ingenuity can solve seemingly intractable problems.

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