Time Travel. A History

For the rest of the universe, pulled in the wake of George’s dreams, progress is not so simple. Just as quantum theorists may have trouble finding sensible pathways through an unconstrained cornucopia of universes, so might the conscientious novelist. Le Guin does not make matters easy for the reader. She draws us no diagrams.^*8 We must drift in her currents and listen carefully. The music changes. The weather changes. Portland is a city of ceaseless rain, “a downpour of warm soup, forever.” Portland enjoys clear air and level sunlight. Was there a dream about President John F. Kennedy and an umbrella? Dr. Haber encourages George to focus on his dread of overpopulation—Portland is a crowded metropolis of three million souls. Or Portland’s population has fallen to a hundred thousand, since the Plague Years and the Crash. Everyone remembers those: pollutants in the atmosphere “combining to form virulent carcinogens,” the first epidemic, “the riots, and the fuck-ins, and the Doomsday Band, and the Vigilantes.” Only George and now Dr. Haber remember multiple realities. “They took care of the overpopulation problem, didn’t they?” George says sarcastically. “We really did it.” When are we less the masters of our thoughts than when we dream?

He is not a time traveler. He does not travel through time. He changes it: the past and the future, at once. Much later, sci-fi developed terminology for these conventions, or borrowed them from physics: alternative histories may be called “timelines” or, per William Gibson, “stubs.” In any one stub, people are bound to think that their history is the only one that happened. It’s not so much that Orr’s dream brings a new plague; it’s that once he has dreamed, the plague had always happened. He begins to appreciate the paradox. “He thought: In that life, yesterday, I dreamed an effective dream, which obliterated six billion lives and changed the entire history of humankind for the past quarter century. But in this life, which I then created, I did not dream an effective dream.” There was always a plague. If this sounds like George Orwell’s “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia,” that’s no accident. Totalitarian governments also purvey alternate histories.^*9

The Lathe of Heaven is a critique of a certain kind of hubris—one that every willful creature shares in some degree. It is the hubris of politicians and social engineers: champions of progress who believe we can remake the world. “Isn’t that man’s very purpose on earth—to do things, change things, run things, make a better world?” says Haber, the scientist, when Orr expresses doubts. Change is good: “Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same river twice.”

George sees it differently. “We’re in the world, not against it,” he says. “It doesn’t work to try to stand outside things and run them that way. It just doesn’t work, it goes against life.” Evidently he is a natural Taoist. “There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be.”

Having solved overpopulation, Haber tries to use George to bring about peace on Earth. What could go wrong? The Alien Invasion. Sirens, crashes, silvery spaceships. The eruption of Mount Hood. Orr dreams an end to racial strife, to “color problems.” Now everyone is gray.

A word from Zhuang Zhou: “Those who dream of feasting wake to lamentation.”

It seems there is no way out of this mess—no way based on intention or control—but an unexpected source of wisdom appears: the Aliens. They look like big green turtles. They sense a kindred spirit in Jor Jor, as well they might, since he has presumably dreamed them into existence. They speak in riddles:

We also have been variously disturbed. Concepts cross in mist. Perception is difficult. Volcanoes emit fire. Help is offered: refusably. Snakebite serum is not prescribed for all. Before following directions leading in wrong directions, auxiliary forces may be summoned.

They sound vaguely Taoist themselves. “Self is universe. Please forgive interruption, crossing in mist.”

Reality vies with irreality. George doubts his sanity. He doubts his free will. He dreams of deep seas and crossing currents. Is he the dreamer or the dream?

“II descend, réveillé, l’autre côté du rêve.” (Le Guin is quoting Victor Hugo now.) He descends, awakened, the other side of the dream.

The Alien says: “There is time. There are returns. To go is to return.”

—

“THIS ABOUT TIME being only a thingummy of thought is very confusing,” said one of E. Nesbit’s wise children, having been initiated into time’s new mysteries. “If everything happens at the same time—”

“It CAN’T!” said Anthea stoutly, “The present’s the present and the past’s the past.”

“Not always,” said Cyril. “When we were in the Past the present was the future. Now then!” he added triumphantly.

And Anthea could not deny it.