Talk:The Lathe of Heaven

Lathe of Heaven
The origin of turning dates to around 1300 BCE when the Ancient Egyptians first developed a two-person lathe. One to turn the wood to be machined and one to shape the wood. It looked a great deal like how we start fires today. Joseph Needham who told Ursula LeGuin the story about the Chinese not having a lathe made a case for claiming Taoism destroyed scientific advance and having a lathe in ancient China would refute his theory. -- 14:12, 4 April 2014‎ User:JohnLloydScharf


 * How does lathes existing in ancient Egypt automatically mean that they would also exist in ancient China? In any case, Needham was the leading mid-20th-century historian of science and technology in China. AnonMoos (talk) 15:29, 13 April 2014 (UTC)

2023

 * It doesn't, and I don't think JohnLloydScharf meant that. Lathes were unknown in China, so a Chinese philosopher couldn't have used them as a metaphor, so he must have been referring to something else. Sluggoster (talk) 21:27, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
 * "Lathes were unknown in China" -- our article at Lathe specifically says that lathes were used in China on an industrial scale during the Warring States period, which is precisely when Zhuangzi is supposed to have been written.
 * Clearly, something somewhere has gotten confused... ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 21:04, 8 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes, starting with the article itself, where the phrase tianjun 天鈞 is cited and its mistranslation noted, yet no one bothers to say what a correct translation would be. Already quite odd. One turns to the Talk section, and it only gets stranger. The Talk about Egypt and Needham and Doaism and lathes is all a huge non sequitur. The questions that need to be addressed instead are these:
 * What does tianjun 天鈞 mean? A: It means "Heaven's potter's-wheel."
 * Where did LeGuin get 'lathe'? A: She got it from the translation by James Legge (1891).
 * Why did Legge mistranslate it? A: He didn't mistranslate it; he was a sinologist; he was exercising poetic license.
 * Has it been correctly translated somewhere? A: Yes, by James Ware (1960) as "nature's wheel."
 * Is there a word for 'lathe' in Chinese? A: Yes, chechuang 車床 but this is a very recent neologism, nonexistent before the latter half of the XX century. (Nor does it even build on jun; rather, it is literally a "bed for a wheeled-machine.")
 * Why is LeGuin so famous anyway, to cause all this fuss? Within a few decades, she'll be forgotten. Second-rate thinker. JiaBokang (talk) 06:01, 29 November 2023 (UTC)
 * If 'heaven's wheel' would be accurate, it would be good to add it to the page. I won't do it myself, because I don't know Chinese.
 * I would also suggest that 'heaven's turning wheel' would be better. And maybe 'lathe of heaven' captures more of the meaning, because it is about change.  Not a persistent cycle, which the 'Wheel of Time' series seems to be, though I have only read the first book and seen the TV adaptation.
 * As for the lasting merit of Le Guin's work - it remains famous after 50 years, which tends to mean permanent. And may rise further as political neoliberalism continues to fade.GwydionM (talk) 09:02, 29 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Throughout this talk section, the discussion is about lathes and Needham. I find that baffling. Why does no one care to know what the phrase tianjun actually means? It means "Heaven's potter's wheel" and it was correctly (if obliquely) translated by James Ware as "[nature's] wheel." JiaBokang (talk) 23:52, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

2024
"鈞" can be found as a component of 陶鈞 as "potter's wheel", rather than "lathe". However. As we say even in the Lathe page: "Lathes can be used to shape pottery, the best-known design being the Potter's wheel" - so if there were potter's wheels, is that not a kind of lathe...? In Potter's wheel we have: "A potter's wheel may occasionally be referred to as a "potter's lathe""... Additionally, while going from 陶鈞 to 鈞 seems like you could just remove the "pottery" (陶) implication and simply write it as "wheel of heaven", that would be a mistake; simplifying it to "wheel" removes a great deal of nuance and adds incorrect connotations - 鈞 is not 'any wheel', it's not a wheel for going anywhere, but rather spins for the purpose of shaping. Destruction on heaven's "spinning machine which shapes creation" - well, it doesn't sound like it's *not* a lathe.

In the Taoist monk Cheng Xuanying's commentary on this passage, he states that 天鈞 is the principle of natural balance. I found this in a Chinese language source: “天钧者，自然均平之理也”. Rather than literally translating it to a 'thing', be it potter's wheel or lathe, it seems like the truer translation is 'natural equilibrium'. Will look for English language source to use as I'm not a translator myself. Fourday (talk) 14:43, 6 February 2024 (UTC)

Change reality or create alternative realities?
The summary confuses whether the dreams create alternative realities or alter reality. Is it one or the other - or both?Royalcourtier (talk) 07:12, 14 February 2015 (UTC)


 * There's no indication that this is switching between alternate worlds. George Orr considers that this is a single reality, whose nature he can change.


 * That past events have changed is the most original element in the plot. --GwydionM (talk) 17:41, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Reality changes, and people inconsistent with the new reality are erased. On the first page Orr is dying in a nuclear war, and in the middle of the book he says the world was destroyed and only dreams remain. That suggests this world is his dying dream, not an alternate reality or parallel universe equal to his original world. Sluggoster (talk) 21:39, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

The Lathe of Heaven and H. G. Wells
Would it be worth mentioning that H. G. Wells wrote a short story on some of the same themes, "The Man Who Could Work Miracles"? It's about a man who has the power to alter reality by wishing it. JHobson3 (talk) 13:01, 22 December 2015 (UTC)


 * Not that similar. And lots of other SF & Fantasy has used it.  --GwydionM (talk) 10:01, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

Plot summary problems
The summary needs work. Some things, like the dream that turns everybody gray, are mentioned twice. Also the long description at the beginning doesn't describe the "real world", just the current world that George has dreamed up. We don't know what the "real world" was because we don't know when George's first dream was. For example, he mentions dreaming his aunt out of existence as a teenager, and that predates the nuclear-holocaust dream 73.137.170.88 (talk) 04:56, 19 January 2016 (UTC)


 * See the past comments of "22:39, 30 May 2009" and "02:39, 7 June 2009" on Talk:The Lathe of Heaven/Archive 1... -- AnonMoos (talk) 04:50, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

Chuang Tzu or Zhuang Zhou
The older Wade-Giles version of the name was universal in the West at the time she used it. I use the current form for the first reference. --GwydionM (talk) 07:54, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

Set in 2002?
Where does it say in the book that it is set in 2002? 2604:2000:F64D:FC00:F41D:52E2:A2D3:C2D6 (talk) 11:13, 9 July 2019 (UTC)


 * About two-thirds of the way through Chapter 7, George refers to "April, four years ago--in '98"... AnonMoos (talk)

Mentioning she is now dead.
Someone objected to the long-standing mention that she was "the late".

Style says that articles should not "dwell on the death".

It does not. Two words are used.

And it had been like that since 3 June 2019, until someone decided to get extremist about a sensible guideline.--GwydionM (talk) 07:06, 27 September 2019 (UTC)


 * I've never seen the statement 'this author is dead' included on the lead to any other article on books, including other books written by Ursula K. Le Guin. the fact that it is included here, while not being included in the lead of her other books, is an unnecessary fact that does not need to be included in the flow of the lead. It might make sense if the book was first published posthumously, but it was not. I think that and the manual of style's guideline demonstrates consensus, and that an administrator should be contacted to prevent prolonging an edit war. Legofan94 (talk) 20:26, 29 September 2019 (UTC)


 * I'd see it as a helpful little detail, and in line with the actual guideline. And don't you have anything better to do than try to uproot facts that are true and mildly useful?--GwydionM (talk) 07:52, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

"Orr...is labeled sick because he is immensely frightened by his ability to change reality"
That's somewhat misleading, or at a minimum cryptically compressed -- he comes to the attention of Haber because he's caught taking a mixture of drugs (some technically illegal for him) in order to suppress dreaming, when dreaming is actually a necessary biological function, which can lead to very serious medical/psychological problems if suppressed. Having a severe phobia of dreaming can be a very grave problem by almost any standard. AnonMoos (talk) 20:47, 23 February 2020 (UTC)


 * I agree with this comment in a literal sense. I do think the original sentence is likely true to the philosophical tone of the book 2600:8801:1B85:AA00:5826:7B06:37A1:9B7D (talk) 01:54, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

George Orr and George Orwell
This idea comes from a book called Political Science Fiction by Donald M Hassler. But the author says only that they think it means this, as well as either / or. It was being presented as if it were a proven fact.

And as they say, every Tom, Dick or Harry is called George.

--GwydionM (talk) 15:53, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

Timeline Diagram
A very useful addition.

Something else worth having would be a diagram of the shifting of the back-story for the whole cycle. I've done this as an appendix in an on-line article, see Eyes and Illusions in Tolkien and Le Guin. It might also be added as text, if anyone thinks it worth it.

For now, I added a brief account on Quora, where I get a lot of reader. See The shifting timelines of the SF novel `The Lathe of Heaven'. -- 08:54, 12 March 2024 GwydionM