Sonia Orwell of George Orwell during the last decade of the writer's life, and other friends of Orwell, have said that Sonia was the model for Julia, the heroine of "Nineteen Eighty-Four", the "girl from the fiction department" who brings love and warmth to the middle-aged hero, Winston Smith. As Orwell wrote in "Nineteen Eighty-Four", "the girl from the fiction department... was looking at him... She was very young, he thought, she still expected something from life... She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated... All you needed was luck and cunning and boldness.
The Lathe of Heaven curing his patient. The book is also critical of the philosophy of utilitarianism, satirising the phrase "The Greatest Happiness for the Greatest Number." It is highly critical of eugenics throughout and somewhat conflates it with utilitarianism in suggesting that it would be a key feature in a society which took the philosophy as its central doctrine. Le Guin may have named her protagonist "George Orr" as an homage to British author George Orwell, as well as to draw comparisons between the dystopic worlds she describes in "Lathe," and the dystopia Orwell envisioned in his novel "1984". An adaptation titled "The