Humanity’s Hubris in Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven
July 16, 2025
A luminary within the American pantheon of science fiction writers, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote The Lathe of Heaven during the late 1960s, which was a period of great political and social change as well as significant momentum for the environmental movement. Le Guin’s novel reflects some of the cultural anxiety of that period in its exploration of a future in which war and ecological disaster are constants, but the novel also reflects Le Guin’s lifelong interest in exploring the fine line between dystopian and utopian alternatives to the world we live in. Ultimately The Lathe of Heaven asks readers to consider not only the means and ends of our dreams for change but also our motivations.
Published in 1971 and set 31 years into the future in the year 2002 in Portland, Oregon, The Lathe of Heaven centers around three main characters: the protagonist George Orr, a psychologist Dr. William Haber, and a lawyer Heather Lelache. George Orr sometimes has dreams that can change aspects of reality, somewhat like instantiating an alternative timeline in something resembling a multiverse. Dr. Haber attempts to harness Orr’s powers and use it for his own purposes, but it does not go smoothly. Miss Lelache attempts to help Orr free himself from Dr. Haber’s control. In the end, they are successful in defeating Dr. Haber and stabilizing the timeline, although the world is not a utopia.
In its portrayal of Orr and Haber’s quest for a more utopian world, the novel explores the ways in which humans are driven by anxiety and fear. In particular, the changes that Dr. Haber encourages Orr to imagine in his dreams are related to Orr’s anxieties about current events (such as war in the middle east) and ecological crises (such as overpopulation and air pollution). However, unintended consequences occur each time Orr has an effective dream. For example, when Haber suggests that Orr dream a solution to war, Orr creates aliens—this has the effect of uniting the world’s governments—but also, now there are aliens that end up visiting earth and causing a misunderstanding among the military that results in the near destruction of Portland and many civilian deaths.
At the end of the novel, despite the world stabilizing in what is far from a utopia, Orr and Lelache appear to be content. Their contentment is based largely on a sense of acceptance and “self-harmony” within the world as it is (p. 138). While Haber is intent on changing the world, arguing that “the whole universe…is essentially change,” Orr counters that the universe’s other aspect is “stillness” (p. 139). Orr attempts to explain this to Haber: “We’re in the world, not against it. It doesn’t work to try to stand outside things and run them that way” (p. 140). Put another way, Orr’s argument about the right way of being in the world reminds me of the metaphor of flowing with the river (or as Orr says, “I follow”) rather than trying to divert it or dam it up (p. 125). A moment in the novel where this metaphor indirectly appears is when Orr and Lelache are at Orr’s cabin in the woods, and Lelache stands outside “listening to the creek shouting and hollering eternal praise! eternal praise! It was incredible that it had kept up that tremendous noise for hundreds of years before she was even born, and would go on doing it until the mountains moved” (110). Of course, the mountains will not move. The connection I draw is to Aldo Leopold’s exhortation to think like a mountain: one must recognize the interconnectedness of all elements in the ecosystem by taking a holistic view of life on earth, rather than adopting an individualistic perspective and thinking that humans can manipulate the ecosystem to suit our desires or anthropocentric utilitarian ideas.
Finally, I want to mention briefly the novel’s title, The Lathe of Heaven, and its appearance in the epigraph to chapter 3. Quoted in translation of Chuang Tse, it reads: “Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason it by using reason. 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” (p. 26). I feel a paraphrase might be rendered as: Do not use reason to understand that which cannot be understood with reason. It is hubris to assert human dominance over the Earth and its ultimately unknowable ecosystem, and to attempt to do so will only lead to destruction.
Further Explorations
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Lathe of Heaven. Scribner, 1971.
Leopold, Aldo. “Thinking Like a Mountain.” A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. Oxford University Press, 1987 [1949], pp. 129–133. https://trainingcenter.fws.gov/resources/knowledge-resources/wildread/thinking-like-a-mountain.pdf.
Various. Excerpts, reviews, and articles about The Lathe of Heaven. https://www.ursulakleguin.com/the-lathe-of-heaven.