I've been meaning to read this ever since a rave recount in Jo Walton's Among Others. In that novel, the heroine Mori reads the book as she explodes into the fascinating landscape of sci-fi, and is swept up in the dense themes and delightful imagery of Le Guin's books, among others.
I'd had a similar experience as a teenager, including Le Guin's Earthsea, as well as Heinlein and the like, but had never crossed paths with this one (considered to be a classic, if something of a dry-run for The Dispossessed - which is coming up soon).
We land in a near-future America, where we discover in hints and off-hand comments that a nuclear war has occurred and been survived, and our protagonist, George Orr, struggles with drugs in a failing, overcrowded Portland Oregon. George has a dark and fearful secret - he dreams, and the dream becomes real, or rather - reality becomes the dream. Where George to dream that the sky was red, he would wake up and find it were the case, had always been the case, and no-one (but him) would remember any different. Terrified by this power, he takes pills to avoid REM sleep, which lead to a run-in with the law, and a mandatory course of treatment with the oneirologist (dream therapist) Dr Haber.
Haber begins to treat George, using a combination of hypnotic suggestion, EEG's and a patented 'feedback' stimulus for the brain which he has developed (the worryingly named 'Augmentor'). When in the room with George whilst he sleeps, he can also recall the previous realities left behind after George awakes, and recognizes the power that George's 'gift' provides. Haber soon begins to exploit George for his 'benevolent' ends, seeking to end the myriad problems facing society, and, heh, helping himself up the ladder along the way.
Here the story settles into an interesting variant on the Faustian myth - with every 'suggestion' from Haber - e.g. create a city where everyone has 'space', being warped in George's subconscious into unintended consquence (a historic plague leading to 5 billion deaths in the 'new' timeline). These range from the horrific to the comical - the solution to 'racial prejudice' being that everyone becomes grey in skin tone.
George, powerless to prevent the increasingly influential Dr Haber from using his dreams, and unable to explain his gifts without being committed to an asylum, seeks advice from Heather Lelache, a mixed-race lawyer he asks to attend one of his sessions. She tries to emancipate George, but again his tricky mind leads to unintended problems. Heather and George's shared struggle leads to a powerful and tender love between the two, and holding the 'original' Heather becomes a key concern for George as timelines clash and morph in his dreams.
As part of Haber's suggestion for 'world peace', George inadvertently creates a mysterious alien race, against which Earth unites for co-defense. These aliens become more central as the storey progresses, and eventually provide George with the key to find a measure of self peace.
These three storey arcs - the morality tale about the perils of ultimate power, the sci-fi storey about alien invasion, and George and Heather's across-all-realities love affair combine powerfully to provide a thought-provoking and heart-warming story. I loved the way Le Guins wrote as George, not as a heroic or decisive man, but as a frightened, principled man, terrified at the vagaries of his own mind. Heather is a damaged but caring soul, and even the megalomaniac Haber is written with great three-dimensionality, and is a sympathetic, if stupid, villain.
The novel builds to an exciting and tightly plotted finale, and it is to the book's great credit, that despite a very loopy concept, the internal logic remains tight and believable right up until the end. This mix of the fantastical with the mysteriousness of the human mind means that Le Guin has the scope to go anywhere - and she doesn't miss the opportunity to go to some pretty weird and thought-provoking places.
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