The Lathe of Heaven
George Orr dreams, and reality rearranges itself to match. His psychiatrist decides to aim those dreams at a better world, with the results you would expect.
George Orr’s dreams change reality retroactively, and the psychiatrist treating him begins steering them toward a better world, with the results you would expect. Le Guin’s 1971 novel is her most Dickian, and the sharpest thing she wrote about the arrogance of improvement and the people who mistake their preferences for progress.
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Maria Popova
Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018) offered a perfect refutation of the central fallacy at the heart of our resistance to change — our tendency to mistake stasis for equilibrium and to mistake the complacency of equilibrium for contentment — in a passage from her 1971 novel The Lathe Of Heaven (public library).
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