On the Lathe of Heaven

This brief book was fascinating, and it had me questioning my own sanity a little. Ursula K. Le Guin takes the Taoism of Alan Watts and the Beatniks seriously and gives us a book about dreams and what they mean for us. When I say the “Taoism of” those figures, I don’t mean it dismissively — it just isn’t Taoism as religion; the emphasis is on being the “uncarved block” and moving with the Tao. I never anticipated a book with pacific, spiritual space turtles, and yet here it is. I appreciated Le Guin’s nuanced take on the “be careful what you wish for” trope: it works here because even good, benevolent things carry negative consequences, and in her telling that’s down to duality — to have good is to get bad, and vice versa, with the way out being a non-dualist perspective. The Lathe of Heaven isn’t character-driven; it plays with a concept, and it seems to come out of the same tradition as Philip K. Dick, especially something like The Man in the High Castle. It might be worth reading alongside her notes on the Tao Te Ching.