Viva Le Guin!

Ursula Le Guin is gone. She was 88 which is a whole lotta years to have lived on this spinning orb.

The Lathe of Heaven was my intro to Le Guin. It ripped my head wide open.

George Orr is a man who discovers he has the peculiar ability to dream things into being -- for better or for worse. In desperation, he consults a psychotherapist who promises to help him -- but who, it soon becomes clear, has his own plans for George and his dreams. (source)

His "effective dreams,” as they’re termed, change the world. Haber, his shrink, tries to harness this power. He’s got some pretty noble aims but, ya know, dreams are weird. We often dream in symbols and our sleepytime “solutions” can be, well, creatively blunt.

The result of Haber’s direction to dream a world without racism is a human race where everyone’s skin is the exact same shade of light grey. (zzzzz!)

Overpopulation, an issue more urgently discussed back when the book came out in ’71, was tackled. George dreams a plague which brings down the planet’s human infestation to one billion rather than seven billion.

Shrinky-dink/Well Meaning Machiavelli wants George to dream peace on earth. Aliens invade the moon. The looming, imminent threat of annihilation unites the earth’s fractious nations.

Yeah, things don't go exactly as planned/hoped.

The book’s title was taken from a beautiful mistranslation of Zhuang Zhou’s writings.

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.

 I plugged the original line – 知止乎其所不能知，至矣。若有不即是者，天鈞敗之– into a translation program and and got something similar-ish but way less poetical.

I want to reread Lathe of Heaven NOW. Dunno if it’ll hit me as hard or be as meaningful at 59 as it was at 15. Maybe it will and maybe it’ll move me in ways it couldn’t way back in my long past, cheeky youth.

I also want to find the brill PBS film version. It’s on YouTube but the auto captioning is, of course, frustratingly dodgy.

John Scalzi has a fab tribute in the LA Times. He writes:

She was a supporting column of the genre, on equal footing and bearing equal weight to Verne or Wells or Heinlein or Bradbury. Losing her is like losing one of the great sequoias.
~~snip~~
She was the mother of so many of us, and you should take time to mourn your mother.

Go read. His memorial is beautiful.
In 2015, Le Guin was asked for a blurb to go on the first offering of a new sci-fi anthology series. The included authors were entirely male – not one female writer in the bunch. She turned the editor down saying, in part:

I cannot imagine myself blurbing a book, the first of the series, which not only contains no writing by women, but the tone of which is so self-contentedly, exclusively male, like a club, or a locker room.

 Again, go read. The whole, short, letter is wonderfully, tartly eloquent.

I can just imagine the brill fire she’d make on all that’s happening right now. Just last February, in a letter to the editor of the Oregonian, she weighed in on the “alternative fact” cretinism.

We fiction writers make up stuff. Some of it clearly impossible, some of it realistic, but none of it real - all invented, imagined --  and we call it fiction because it isn't fact. We may call some of it "alternative history" or "an alternate universe," but make absolutely no pretense that our fictions are "alternative facts.”
~~snip~~
The test of a fact is that it simply is so - it has no "alternative."  The sun rises in the east.  To pretend the sun can rise in the west is a fiction, to claim that it does so as fact (or "alternative fact") is a lie.

Viva Le Guin!