I recently started reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (science fiction is now my favorite holiday from current news and events).
A moment in the story stood out.
Genly Ai is a human envoy sent out to convince another human world to join an interstellar alliance. In his explorations, he meets a community of folks who are Foretellers. They will answer any question you bring them (for a steep price) about the future. They are never wrong. But their answers often yield unintended consequences for the asker.
In this scene, Genly is in conversation with an elder Forteller, Faxe.
“You don’t see yet, Genly, why we perfected and practice Foretelling?”
“No”
“To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.”
“The unknown,” said Faxe’s soft voice in the forest, “the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action…The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”
The Left Hand of Darkness is most fascinating because it explores a world where gender is entirely fluid, rendering gender essentially meaningless. I am still reading the book. I also highly recommend the science fiction of Nnedi Okorafor, my first post-Octavia Butler reading crush.
Jeff Merrell 