Jessica Mae Stover Apr 15, 2018

really liked it bookshelves: books-i-will-read-again

's review

What surprises me about Tao-themed Lathe of Heaven is that it all at once takes a subversive look at hegemonic masculinity while undermining itself with bits of sexism, racism etc. -- the deep biases that the author (Le Guin, scifi feminist who did so much for us) must have absorbed.



Those biases in the text serve as a warning for modern authors. In following Le Guin's experience here, in turn I'm lead to wonder what I might have absorbed that I still can't recognize despite sociological training and attempts to recognize and unlearn biases. Maybe I think I'm making progress, but that's only in comparison to reality's very low bar and I'm not achieving my vision. We must also look beyond solely reforming the biases that impact us personally to those that impact others, lest we become to someone else that which we despise. Lathe was published in 1971, and the future may hold similar criticisms for me and fellow contemporaries if we don't use these lessons.



At the end of recent printings of The Tombs of Atuan, there is an essay from Le Guin wherein she reflects that she didn't have all the tools in the '70s to tell the story exactly as she wished. I can identify with that: language has inequalities and so language is a barrier to representations of equality. There have been improvements, but barriers remain. If an author is too inventive with language, a book becomes inaccessible. In that way we are limited by our readers. I know I can only challenge you to a certain point before I lose you, and that posed some challenges for me when writing Astral Fall. However in Lathe there are items that could have been addressed had the author been able to see them as problematic.



The novel sets out to subvert gender by presenting an alternative exploration of masculinity, but undermines itself by keeping to other problematic patterns and portrayals.



Since Lathe is otherwise a quality work and an exceptional case of bias, it is still worth reading. The context of the biases here earn it a possible exception because the example of how difficult it is for one of our key feminist visionary scifi writers to break out of sociological construct has value. But if the modern reader can't or won't identify those problems, or reads only for the surface story passively, then the novel will only reinforce the biases Le Guin spent her career confronting.



And our Heathers will never have the freedoms our Georges do.