Ridley looks back up at the Lathe of Heaven poster. It was the first novel by Le Guin he ever read, about a man whose dreams could alter reality itself—a power that eventually passes for a time to the man’s therapist, through a device called the Augmentor. Strange how time changes one’s relationship to a work. Back then Ridley saw the story as distant from the reality he lived in. Now he sees all the ways reality can be written and unwritten before his very eyes. True reality is scary, and so we’ve fashioned a pretty substitute, agreed to it. To live within it, people have augmented
...more
