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Maybe my favorite Le Guin book. This one is haunting, not in a bad way, just in a gonna stick in my brain way. The characters — only 3, really — were so real. The plot is about dreaming, and what if we could change reality with our dreams, but really the plot is about power and how we’ll fool ourselves into believing whatever we need to believe to justify power-grabs (and more). Control, control, control. Beautiful writing, as always. Le Guin knows how to fill in the details and trust the reader. Her balance is impeccable.

That Haber could have thus got out of communication with himself was rather hard for Orr to conceive; his own mind was so resistant to such divisions that he was slow to recognize them in others. But he had learned that they existed. He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safe for children to grow up in. (p87)

He never spoke with any bitterness at all, no matter how awful the things he said. Are there really people without resentment, without hate? she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it? (p100)

He stood looking at her and smiling, a broad, radiant smile of pure joy. She had never received so great a compliment in her life; she was abashed by that joy, which she had caused. (p158)

He was all alone, and nothing seemed to be real in solitude. He needed somebody, anybody, to talk to, he had to tell them what he felt so that he knew if he felt anything. This horror of being by himself was strong enough that it almost drove him out…but the apathy was still stronger than the fear. He did nothing, and the night darkened. (p115)

The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained, the vaster the appetite for more. (p131)