It is not the kind of "utopia" where the political and economic system is so productive and profitable it lets the people invent a magic perpetual motion engine, Atlas Shrugged-style Indeed Shevek's story is about how their system works *against* that possibility
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
Le Guin was not a friend to gee-whiz futurism of the kind that characterized old-school Golden Age science fiction (just as Ayn Rand honestly was kind of an ultimate reductio ad absurdum of that mindset) Haber in Lathe of Heaven is kind of an avatar of that ideology
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
And just in terms of his personality he embodies what's repulsive about it He's just such a douche He's gets so *annoyed* whenever you bring up a child in the closet in Omelas "Fuck you, who says there has to be one? Dream bigger man"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
"If I had a dream machine, I would simply imagine a second City of Omelas, inside the closet, and therefore that Child would not be suffering but be happy And then assuming there was a smaller closet with a smaller Child, I would address the infinite regress with Cantorian sets"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
I do think about the wacky fact that all the new worlds created in The Lathe of Heaven are literally inside Orr's mind That there's one reading of the story where literally nothing is happening but Orr having a dying hallucination after a nuclear war
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
Le Guin is careful not to say anything about the objective external universe in The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas It's not the *world* that says the Child has to exist, it's not God who says it, it's not "natural law" It's *you*, it's *your imagination* that can't handle it
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
The reason Haber's dream machine keeps on fucking up and not actually making the perfect utopia Haber carefully programmed into it is the machine doesn't do the dreaming George Orr's brain does the dreaming The world can only be as perfect as Orr can imagine it being
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
And, like, he admits it in the story, when he tries to reason with Haber It's his own weakness, it's his own fault, blame him for it if you must But his mind is only a human mind, he's not an omnipotent God, he cannot make utterly new realities that work on different principles
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
So yeah there is what you'd call a kind of quietism there, what Dostoyevsky, the original source for the whole imagery with the child in the closet, would call Christian humility Although I think Le Guin herself is humble enough not to even call it universal human nature
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
George Orr isn't all humans either, he's not an Ur-Human Everyman He's a specific guy, a white Middle American 1950s dude Unfortunately, we are all stuck in his world in TLoH and we have to deal with how far specifically the fabric of his mind can stretch before breaking
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(You can immediately see why this metaphor is something that people would get frustrated and angry with But I mean on a certain level the brute fact of it is true These are the people we have, who currently populate the country and hold the power You work with what you got)
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