Movies - The Lathe of Heaven

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	Movies - The Lathe of Heaven

The Lathe of Heaven is a 1971 science fiction novel by Ursula K. Le Guin. It has been adapted into two television films. The novel was nominated for a Hugo Award and won the Locus Poll Award for best novel in 1972. It first appeared in the magazine Amazing Stories, before being published in paperback in 1973; a paperback edition was reprinted in New York by Eos in 1997 with ISBN 0380791854.

The novel is set in Portland, Oregon at some near future time when overpopulation is a major problem. However, this is soon revealed to be only one of many future worlds that have been literally dreamed into existence by the main character, George Orr, whose subconscious mind has an inexplicable power over reality. (The 'real world' had been destroyed in a nuclear war; Orr dreamed it back into existence as he lay dying in the ruins.) Feeling it is not his place to change reality and wanting to gain control over his power with the goal of stopping it, George enlists the services of an ambitious psychiatrist, William Haber, who discovers this power and seeks to use it to change the world; his experiments produce a series of increasingly intolerable alternate worlds, based on an assortment of utopian and dystopian premises familiar from other science fiction works:

When Haber directs George to dream a world without racism, the skin of everyone on the planet becomes a uniform light gray.
An attempt to solve the problem of overpopulation proves disastrous when George dreams a devastating plague which wipes out 75% of humanity.
George attempts to dream into existence a world where all humans unite in a common goal - resulting in an alien invasion.

The beginnings of the chapters also feature quotes from H.G. Wells, Victor Hugo and Taoist sages.

Though technology plays a slight role, the novel is largely concerned with philosophical questions about our desire to control our destiny, with Haber's positivist approach pitted against a Taoist equanimity (the title is taken from the writings of Chuang Tzu, Book XXIII, paragraph 7). Due to its portrayal of psychologically-derived alternate realities, it has often been described as Le Guin's homage to Philip K. Dick.

The 1980 adaptation—generally faithful to the novel—was produced by the public television station WNET, directed by David Loxton and Fred Barzyk. It starred Bruce Davison, Kevin Conway, and Margaret Avery. Due to rights issues surrounding the use of a clip from the Beatles tune "With A Little Help From My Friends" (the tune is an intricate part to one of the novel's plot points), this version was never re-aired, and was not released to home video until 2004 (In fact, the home video release is remastered from a tape someone recorded from the original broadcast. PBS, thinking the rights issues would dog the production forever, did not save a copy of the production in their archives). The rights issue was solved by replacing the original Beatles tune with a cover version of the same song.

A second adaptation, retitled Lathe of Heaven, was produced for the A&E network in 2002 and directed by Philip Haas. It starred James Caan, Lukas Haas, and Lisa Bonet. This adaptation discards a significant portion of the plot, some essential characters, and much of the philosophical underpinnings of the book and the original PBS production.

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