 The late of heaven asks what if you had control over God? George Orr is afraid of falling asleep. When he dreams a particular kind of dream, what the Gwynne titles an effective dream or wakes up? To find reality has quite literally shifted to accommodate that dream. When we first meet him, the weight of this has turned him into a drug user taking anything that will suppress his dreams. It is this that sends him into the private practice of one William Haber, a psychiatrist and a neurologist who will proceed to use also effective dreams to reshape reality in increasingly ambitious ways. Haber finds Orr almost loathsome. George awakens contempt in the psychiatrist, Haber sees in Orr a man so weak and without character as to be bullied, as to awaken bullying by his very presence. He finds George's peculiar state of poise, not a sign of self-harmony, but rather self-cancellation. Haber has ideas, grand ideas, as we find out about the way the world should be. Every utopian notion that you might be brave enough to dream of, eliminating war, eliminating racial hatred, restoring the ecological balance of the planet and solving over population, tackling poverty and inequality, mental illnesses and more. But his tool or himself is imperfect. He resists, he struggles, he frustrates every one of Haber's attempts to reorganize reality according to his beliefs. And all of this comes from these two men's very different conceptions of the way reality works, in human beings role within that framework. Or reminds me of no one so much as Dostoevsky's idiot, especially here. He never spoke with any bitterness at all, no matter how awful the things he said. Are there really people without resentment, without hate, she wanted? People who never go cross-grain to the universe, who recognize evil and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it. He has that same childlike innocence backed by a moral strength of character. In Haber is he is, in some ways, a very clear crystallization of the values of the Judeo-Christian rationalist West. He is an individualist who doesn't quite believe anything outside of him exists. He catches on pretty quickly that Orr can change reality. So he lies to himself about it at first. Later he lies to Orr as well, because he thinks you can make things come out right. All the meanwhile, having no interest in what is true, in what is, he can see anything except his mind, his ideas of what ought to be. True Haber, this novel asks not only can we imagine the future, but what is the price for that future? Six billion lives lost. That's a start. And by the end of late of heaven the words spoken in jest by the novel stood. Main character, Header Lillach, echo back to the reader. Haber becomes, in truth, a mad scientist with an infernal machine, further and further engaged in a project that sees him mold the world in continuously more utilitarian ways, while also increasing Haber's own influence and position. This never once seems to strike Haber as wrong, so we recognize it as such. But one of the defining qualities of the psychiatrist is his extreme rationalist utilitarian view of the world, a view in which morality plays no part. Opposite this is our dreamer, George Orr. Ironically, Orr does not dream of a better world. Rather, he believes that the world must not be pushed and prodded, or rather that reality, must not be changed according to the whims and desires of man. Where Haber is described as only having layers upon layers in never a center, or is characterized thus by Header. He was the strongest person she had ever known, because he could not be moved away from the center. And what happens when two opposite forces meet halfway? Collision. The novel is a philosophical tour de force. The larger part of it takes the form of dialogues between Orr and Haber, occasionally broken through with expository description and the appearance of Header, the ambitious lawyer whose hunger for life's mysteries leaps off the page. I've not given Header her due here, but she has an importance to the story I'll mull over in a future video later down the line, hopefully. A work of social sci-fi if there ever was one. That is what the Leeds of Heaven is. Here the argument can be made that this work deserves more than most the label of science fantasy. Scholar Karl D. Malmgren in his paper on the late of heaven makes the point that the main conceit of this novel, the dreaming inherently violates the norms of scientific possibility. And that changing reality through dreaming is unscientific. Le Guin herself admits that in an interview. It is a pure and not adulterated fantasy. Malmgren's is a brilliant take on the book, by the way, and you can find more information about it down below a link to GS store if you'd like to read it. It digs a fair bit deeper into the characters of Orr and Haber than this video does at a personal level. I picked this up from the library recently because I'm working on a Philip K. Dick paper on reality and an unusual uncertainty and this book I knew is Le Guin's tribute to so many of the ideas that Philip K. Dick examined in his own uber in the 60s. Before we end this, I want to point one thing out. Despite being rather shall we say critical of Dr. Haber, I do want to make certain you understand that he is not a villain. He is not a bad guy either. He is far closer to us modern folks of the year 2021 than George Orr is. He is all about progress, all about change and if I had to pick a character to liken myself after, I would definitely pick Haber overall. He is a product of this Western civilization of ours and nothing so much as a do-gooder who believes not in science for its own aims but in science as a tool to aid others. You should read The Leed of Heaven. It is a fascinating novel that discusses the ontological questions of reality like few others. It is a tribute, as I said to Philip K. Dick's body of work from the 60s and yet it is marked also by the 70s uncertainty about the ways in which human agency can produce meaningful change in terms of our very own human reality. And this brings me to another question. Which Ursula K. Le Guin book should I read next? Thank you for watching my video. If you enjoyed this, please like it, share it with your friends. Don't forget to subscribe and Yes, smash that like button, ring that bell for notifications and whatever it is that YouTubers say here at the end of the video. If you'd like to see more, there's a video here and probably a video here and maybe somewhere around here. And I hope to see you next time. Bye!