I’ve had to pack up my library for reasons, so downstairs I have nearly 70 x 40 litre cartons of books accumulated over 50 years. I don’t have TBR piles, I have TBR book cases. I wonder if there are enough years left to read them, plus all the others out there that I don’t know about yet. That is not a useful thought, so I put it over there in the naughty corner with all of the other not very useful cogitations. Man does not live by bread alone, so I have kept aside a bookcase of unreads to sustain me and no body is yet making me do otherwise. It is a good thing, I say, like those people dealing with Billy Mumy on the Twilight Zone. Less to choose from means less procrastination. I’ll be able to focus.

Of course I have gone straight for one of the yellow-spined SF Masterworks series I have there, and the first book read from the TBRBC was Ursula Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven. I had read previously that this was her “doing” Philip K Dick, and I can see why. Reality is slippery, with the main character George Orr (hmmm) either changing the past or slipping between alternative time continuums when he “effectively” dreams. There are so many PKD tics or tropes: Orr’s difficult relationships not just with time and reality, but also drugs, authority figures (his psychiatrist is a doozy), and with women. The world(s) Orr lives in is not pleasant, but he is in a bit of a Goldilocks zone, fitting in just right in terms of height, weight and various medical tests. Orr’s lawyer / wife / girlfriend / customer (it varies with the world), Miss LeLache starts off flawed in the way that a PKD female character might be, and Le Guin is not subtle about how Dick draws women. She thinks “of herself as a Black Widow,” (which incidentally she is, though not an arachnid) “poisonous; hard, shiny, and poisonous; waiting, waiting. And the victim came. A born victim.” Who is Orr, of course.

His psychiatrist, William Haber, is not much better: “Haber recognised in himself a protective / bullying reaction toward this physically slight and compliant man. To dominate, to patronise him was so easy as to be almost irresistable”. And dominates him he does, all in the interest of course of building Utopia.

The book was published in 1971 and Haber was said to be born in 1962, so I am guessing it is set a little after the turn of the century. Haber is old enough to remember blue skies, but “though the Greenhouse Effect had been quite gradual … the eternal snows were gone from all of the world’s mountains, even Everest, even Erebus, fiery-throated on the waste Antarctic shore”. That is not the worst world they get to inhabit, and fortunately we are not there yet, but the climate-change world presented is not as bad as our world will be – prescient though the book is in this respect, it is a little like 1950 – 60s sf (PKD’s included) where nuclear war is not the holocaust it really would be if it happened. But as I said, hold on, their world gets worse as Haber tries to make it better.

Orr keeps going, keeps trying, puttering around like a PKD protagonist, designing not jewellery but other items, working in a store run by a friendly alien, and there is a happy-ish ending. With characters leaving and returning, I never had a feeling that there were real stakes involved, but like a PKD novel sometimes it is the weirdness of the ideas that matters, and the comforting notion that there are little people who keep the world turning, maybe even more so than we realise.