%2The Lathe Of Heaven%1 by Ursula K. Le Guin, Avon 1971

	It's a good story, well told, but I suppose the ideas
are meant to be taken seriously, and they aren't any good at all.

	First of all, let's distinguish the ideas from the literary
devices.  The story takes place in Portland, Oregon about the year
2010, and the protagonist is a man who changes the world retroactively
when he dreams and his antagonist is a psychiatrist who manipulates
the hero to change the world according to his essentially
benevolent but increasingly megalomaniac ideas.  The idea of being
able to change the world retroactively by dreaming we shall charitably
call a literary device to show the different worlds rather than
a science fiction idea, because, as the latter, it is too implausible.

	One common literary theme that gets a more interesting treatment
than usual is the question of whether a powerful tool can be used
to change the world for the better.  On the whole the answer seems
to be yes even though what happens is never very close to what
the psychiatrist intends.  The final world is less crowded and
has some rather interesting aliens, even though in getting to it,
a great plague is retroactively  created that has wiped out most
of the population of the world.  Even the fact that the psychiatrist
ends up in the nut house doesn't destroy this generally favorable
impression.  But maybe this is just the theme of the cleansing
catastrophe as in Noah's flood.

	The ideas that I want to take seriously are the alternate
futures that may occur, which are out of a Paul Ehrlich scenario,
more or less.
All these futures show the United States as totally crowded.  She
doesn't say what the population is, but it is certainly shown as
much more crowded than Holland today,
which would give the U.S. a population of about 2.5 billion,
whereas it is about 210 million now, and the largest projections
for the year 2010 would be about 320,000,000.
I can't see any excuse for this.  Indeed the middle aged Americans of
2010 were already alive when she wrote the story.

1982 February - Notes on "The Dispossessed"

	This is much more plausible but still not very.

1. Annares is a kibbutz writ large, so kibbutz experience is relevant.

	a. The desire for private housing would come out in 20 years or less

	b. The desire for freedom from posting would come out soon.

	c. There would be a tendency for a private economy to develop
offering services not otherwise available - such as money, i.e. savable
calls on goods and services.  Money is almost certainly needed for
inter-enterprise dealings.  Otherwise, how would an enterprise know
which services of other enterprises to use when alternate means of
achieving the same objective were available.

	d. There would be a tendency for a bureaucracy with secret police
to develop.

	e. When there is no money, allocations are made by politics, which
is far more corrupting.  The stories about how Russian leaders at the time
of the revolution took no more salaries than workers and how workers brought
Lenin gifts of fruit, etc. describe the beginning of the system of special
stores for the Soviet elite.

2. A io confuses feudalism and capitalism.  Why no rich socialists?  Why
no unions?

3. Technological and scientific errors.

	a. A world that can afford space transport of minerals can afford
air transport.

	b. Planet wide drought is dubious.

	c. The postulated arithmetic of resources is wrong quite apart from
technology.  If a few centuries of opulence exhausted resources, the thousands
of years of frugality wouldn't be possible even with the resources of a moon,
which after all is smaller than the main planet.

	Come to think of it, a planet that depended on its moon for survival
would hardly give it to people it considered crackpots.