00100	%2The Lathe Of Heaven%1 by Ursula K. Le Guin, Avon 1971
00200	
00300		It's a good story, well told, but I suppose the ideas
00400	are meant to be taken seriously, and they aren't any good at all.
00500	
00600		First of all, let's distinguish the ideas from the literary
00700	devices.  The story takes place in Portland, Oregon about the year
00800	2010, and the protagonist is a man who changes the world retroactively
00900	when he dreams and his antagonist is a psychiatrist who manipulates
01000	the hero to change the world according to his essentially
01100	benevolent but increasingly megalomaniac ideas.  The idea of being
01200	able to change the world retroactively by dreaming we shall charitably
01300	call a literary device to show the different worlds rather than
01400	a science fiction idea, because, as the latter, it is too implausible.
01500	
01600		One common literary theme that gets a more interesting treatment
01700	than usual is the question of whether a powerful tool can be used
01800	to change the world for the better.  On the whole the answer seems
01900	to be yes even though what happens is never very close to what
02000	the psychiatrist intends.  The final world is less crowded and
02100	has some rather interesting aliens, even though in getting to it,
02200	a great plague is retroactively  created that has wiped out most
02300	of the population of the world.  Even the fact that the psychiatrist
02400	ends up in the nut house doesn't destroy this generally favorable
02500	impression.  But maybe this is just the theme of the cleansing
02600	catastrophe as in Noah's flood.
02700	
02800		The ideas that I want to take seriously are the alternate
02900	futures that may occur, which are out of a Paul Ehrlich scenario,
03000	more or less.
03100	All these futures show the United States as totally crowded.  She
03200	doesn't say what the population is, but it is certainly shown as
03300	much more crowded than Holland today,
03400	which would give the U.S. a population of about 2.5 billion,
03500	whereas it is about 210 million now, and the largest projections
03600	for the year 2010 would be about 320,000,000.
03700	I can't see any excuse for this.