Taivaan työkalu

This one, to me, seemed very untypical for Le Guin. I would have thought it was one of her first, but actually it was written after the hainish cycle. The Taoism is very on the nose here, but it doesn't have much of the poetry and the reverence for life and mind that I loved about her other works.

It was written as an homage to Philip K. Dick and it really read more like one of his novels, like classical 70s sci-fi.

It's funny how of all the books I've read by Le Guin, the one that's set on a baseline plausible Earth-in-my-lifetime would turn out to be the weirdest. Also funny how in what starts as a pretty reasonable extrapolation from 1971 to ~2000 has one repeated glaring error: multiple references to the perfect cone of Mount St. Helen's.

Against that background, we get a story of a man running away from his dreams because they give him a power he doesn't understand and can't control. And another man who wants to channel that power, setting up a modern Daoist fable about the hubris of trying to control too much.