Review: The Lathe of Heaven

post by dr_s · 2025-01-31T08:10:58.673Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

Contents

  The short, spoiler-free version
  The longer version
  Wait, that's that?
None
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"The Lathe of Heaven" is a 1971 sci-fi novel by Ursula K. Le Guin. It's the story of a man, George Orr, who lives in a future ravaged by climate change and overpopulation. He gets referred to voluntary-but-not-really psychological treatment for abuse of certain pharmaceutical drugs and eventually reveals to his therapist, one Dr. Haber, that the reason for his abuse was that he wanted to prevent himself dreaming - because sometimes his dreams become real. Dr. Haber, a man of reason and science, of course does not believe him, at first.

Then the trouble begins.

The short, spoiler-free version

This being something more of a philosophical novel or parable, and a very short one at that, I don't think staying away from spoilers is particularly important to enjoy it; nevertheless, here I'll give some opinions about the novel without going into specifics for those who haven't read it and want to go in relatively blind. I'll expand later on what I think makes this novel interesting here, but I can't do that without talking about its plot.

I've seen people make the case that this novel is Ursula K. Le Guin doing her best Philip K. Dick impression, and I can totally see that. There are a lot of commonalities. The setting is oppressive and dystopian, somewhat inhuman. There is a strong focus on mental illness and the fleeting nature of reality itself - subsumed to the unconscious mind, shaped by Orr's dreams. The story is not as psychedelic as Ubik or A Scanner Darkly (for the latter I've only watched a movie, but it was quite psychedelic), but it belongs clearly to the same genre. I don't even know if it can be really called science fiction; the science elements are present and it is suggested that Orr's power really is some kind of natural phenomenon, but its qualities are still fundamentally magical, and only possible within a world in which the connection between the mind and the real is so skewed towards the former that empiricism itself might be in question as a metaphysics.

So, how is it as a read? I've certainly never been bored by it. It's an engaging read, it's dense and quick to the point, doesn't overstay its welcome, which is good, because in this kind of story it's quite clear from very early on where is it all going. The prose is pleasant and has a few more flourishes than you'd see in most classic SF of the same era, while still being mostly pragmatic and dry. The characters are few and quite thin, like actors playing a role for the respective ideas they represent. But as far as I'm concerned that's fine in a story that is fundamentally conceptual as this one.

And the concept is... well, the concept is interesting. In the following sections I will delve into it. Without spoiling anything, all I can say is that I think most rationalists (and effective altruists even more so) will definitely not be indifferent to it. You might love it. You might hate it. It might at least make you think. But it's saying something that one way or another is deeply relevant to a lot of stuff we care about.

O reader, if you wish to go onward, consider thyself be warned: here be spoilers.

The longer version

To sum up the plot of the novel after that premise is laid out: Dr. Haber, upon realising that George Orr really does have reality-bending dreams, decides this ability must be harnessed for the greater good. His idea of greater good is much what you could expect from a socially and environmentally conscious man of the 1970s who's steeped in the worries of the time, including a certain streak of Malthusianism. He repeatedly hypnotises Orr and uses a machine of his own invention, the Augmentor, to induce REM sleep in him at will. He orders him to dream dreams that will change the world.

And every single time he does this, things manage to go more and more wrong.

See, Orr doesn't just change things in the here and now. He literally rewrites how history was and has ever been, he steers the entire universe on a new timeline. The only people retaining some awareness of this are those at the epicentre of the event - Orr himself, and anyone who induced or witnessed his hypnotic suggestion. So when Haber asks for a solution to overpopulation, 6 billion people get retroactively killed by a pandemic that had otherwise never happened. When Haber asks for peace between nations on Earth, they have to unite only because now we're at war with aliens. These sort of monkey's paw catches keep happening, in part because of Haber's own imprecise instructions, and in part because Orr's subconscious still gets to fill the gaps in the dream with whatever random stuff it comes up with, and the subsconscious mind isn't famous for its moral sense. 

Orr is increasingly disturbed by the consequences of his dreams, but he does not oppose Haber fiercely enough, in part because in each new reality Haber makes himself more powerful, ascending from a mere state therapist to a powerful leader of a cabal of technocrats ruling the world. All, of course, for the greater good. They are polar opposites - Orr is passive, he wants to go with the flow, and suggests that Haber is wrong to so fiercely try and rearrange the world against the will of anyone living in it, but his own passiveness means he's just not very effective at resisting or foiling Haber. Haber seems to despise Orr's passivity, and considers his gift wasted on him; he does his best to find a scientific way to reproduce that ability so it can be controlled by someone better suited.

Eventually, Haber succeeds. He relieves Orr of his power (Orr is only too happy of this), and instead uses it himself. And after several times that Orr had changed the world at least partially successfully, the very moment Haber starts dreaming, he has a nightmare that almost destroys the entirety of existence. Orr takes the only real initiative he's taken in the entire story and turns the Augmentor off. The world remains somewhat rattled, but it still exists. Haber's ambition and failure land him in a lunatic asylum, his mind destroyed by the experience.

Life moves on, not particularly better or worse than before. And that's that.

Wait, that's that?

"Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is... never try." - Homer Simpson

One might ask - what lesson are we supposed to take from "The Lathe of Heaven"? Because there is no doubt that this is a novel which sets out to send us A Lesson: it's obviously a philosophical sort of story, not meant for particularly high entertainment value (I think there is not a smidgen of comedy in the entire book, for example), but to make us think.

The obvious, overly literal one is that Dr. Haber failed because if omnipotence came in the form of reality-warping dreams that would be quite dangerous. But I doubt we risk ever running into that problem.

The broader one is that Dr. Haber failed because his attempt was misguided to begin with. This is very reinforced by the text. Orr thinks it himself - that Haber is "not in touch". He means well, but lacks the knowledge of how the world works and the perspective inside other people's minds to actually understand what does it mean for it to be better. That's how after several iterations of rewriting the entire timeline he gets to a world with no war, no racism, far less illness and hunger than our own that still somehow seems much more depressing to live in, as the literally grey masses shuffle around and occasionally stop for one state-mandated eugenic purge. He focuses too much on the macro level and forgets that things like eliminating war, or hunger, or racism, are themselves only instrumental goals - the true end goal is for people to be happy, and so even removing those other things can still fail if you replace them with new, inventive ways of making everyone completely miserable.

But the book seems to go even further. I've seen the book referred to as being Taoist; now I don't know much (or anything, really) about Taoism, but I assume this refers to the core concept that change is only good if done, in some ineffable way, "along the flow" rather than against it. The title of the book comes from a translated quote by philosopher Chuang Tzu, which also appears as an epigraph at the beginning of one chapter:

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.

The thesis here is pretty clear. It's not just that Haber fails to know certain things. It's that certain things are deeply unknowable, and believing otherwise will be your undoing. Knowing the boundaries of what can't be known is a good thing! It means you don't pursue vastly destructive and pointless enterprises that presume they know, based on some necessarily flawed understanding. We do not necessarily find this particularly ambiguous in and of itself. If I built a massive AI with the goal of finding a set of axioms underpinning a consistent and complete description of mathematics I'd have another thing coming; the AI could grow until it grinds the universe to dust and still not succeed. Maybe Gödel too was a contributor to the Tao.

But is how to improve the world unknowable? That seems a much stronger thesis. At one point Orr and Haber have a conversation that is reminiscent of the "drowning child" argument by Peter Singer. Haber tries to persuade the reticent Orr by making the example of him encountering a woman who has been bitten by a snake, and having the antivenom on himself. Would he just let the woman die in order to let "the flow of the world" go on undisturbed? Would that be the good thing? Of course not. So what is different between that and Haber's drive to improve the world, to rescue people from all their problems? Or more broadly - isn't the issue just Haber's model of the world, of what are the problems? The imperfection of his dream-inducing machine and hypnotic suggestion? If you could wield the same power with better knowledge and better control, wouldn't you be able to just do some good?

Orr does not really come up with a satisfying, sharp answer. He agrees helping the snake-bitten woman is obviously the right thing. He disagrees interfering with the world at a massive scale, affecting everyone's lives without their knowledge or consent, and generally mucking with the fabric of existence in wildly unpredictable ways is quite as right. That's definitely two easy extremes to pick, and there is a lot of grey area in between them.

I think we're left to roughly guess where the author, or the book, or Orr, actually stand on this. There is a question of consent, for sure, and of understanding - you can not make people happy if you are not in touch with their preferences, you definitely can't make them happy if you think you know their preferences better than they do themselves, or if you pursue some other idealised goal to which individuals are secondary. Infinite power at your fingertips means no constraints on where you can go to optimize, with all the known side-effects on any other things that may matter but do not figure in your objective function. Haber's pursuit, in this sense, isn't all too different from attempting to build an aligned AGI that will turn the world into a utopia. The pitfalls are exactly the same.

There is also a question of means. Perhaps the fact that Haber attains this power by being manipulative and coercive towards Orr taints it at the root, and thus Orr's subconscious delivers the karma for it by rebelling in small ways, making the dreams not quite right? That's a very deontological perspective, but one can also interpret it as a revelation of character; the kind of man who lacks that much empathy towards the one single patient sitting on his couch can't actually have much more for the rest of humanity. Perhaps the power itself is inherently unnatural, compared to doing things with your own two hands? But the novel actually makes it clear it can be replicated probably by anyone simply by triggering the correct brainwaves - Orr merely happened to awake it accidentally. It certainly is extremely dangerous, but that's because of its far reach combined with its poor control. It might be that the lesson is that all great power on such a scale ends up being like that - a mighty beast that kicks and chomps at the bit to go wild.

And there is the question of knowledge. Why is it that this power comes with dreams, specifically? They're vague, confusing, barely under our control. By comparison, Dr. Haber's visions for the world are scientific, rigorous, backed by evidence and rational study. But the world is complex. It has intricate dynamics and lots of detail and weird knock-on effects. We can see that even by how outdated some of the details of the problems presented in the book's world, as understood by the sensibilities of 1970s environmentalism, actually feel to us - the planet is desperately overpopulated to the point of famine and rationing with the staggering population of seven billion people, and climate change seems to be already wracking it quite more savagely than it does now in the year 2002^[1]. Complex problems defy easy, accurate predictions. To the intricately woven territory of the real world, the simplistic routes Haber traced on his map may as well be as vague and poorly defined as dreams. Take one wrong turn and who knows where you'll end.

One might then read the tale as desperately passive and fatalistic; as an encouragement to accept that which is and simply not reach too far in any attempts to fix it, lest you be burned. It may be so; I feel like it probably is a bit too much, for me, even as I broadly agree with the thesis it gestures at about the dangers of trying to do big things with our little brains.

But there is also one detail about it that I have left out. The dreams induced by Dr. Haber are not the first time Orr changed the world. There was one time before. The entire world as we see it at the beginning of the novel, Dr. Haber included, was itself a creation of Orr's mind. The real world had him sitting amidst the blasted, radioactive ruins of civilization, one of the handful of survivors of a nuclear holocaust with little to do but wait for extinction. In that world, he fell asleep, and dreamed of a (somewhat) better one.

And that, at least, even George Orr can agree was for the best.

1. ^{^}

   But hey, might have just been a few decades off on that one, so let's not get cocky.

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