Recently, we read The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin, one concept that she touched on in this novel is the idea that knowing your future is useless because knowing your future can cause it to happen. This comes up in the chapters related to “foretelling”, the ceremony practiced by the Handdara. The story, in particular,r that I feel best illustrates this is the story of the kemmer pair between Lord Berosty and Herbor. In this story, Berosty asks “what day shall I die?”, only to be told, rather vaguely, that he will die on Odstreth (the nineteenth day of the month). This sends him into paranoia. In order to try and help him, his partner, Herbor, goes to ask “How long will [Berstoy] live?” only to be told “longer than Herbor of Geganner!”. This prophesy fulfils itself because Berosty kills his kemmer in anger over not getting the desired answer.  Berosty is left in despair at what he has done and later commits suicide on Odstreth. The interesting part of this story is that if the original question had not been asked by Berosty then he would likely not have died so soon. This can also be said of Herbor. I think part of the point of this chapter is to illustrate that knowing the future does not help stop it and if anything, only aids it. In fact, the Handdara believe that ignorance should be prized and that “ignorance is the ground of thought…The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty”. Knowing the future just stops us from living in the moment and in some cases stops us from realizing the many possibilities available to us. In The Left hand of Darkness, once Meshe becomes “the center of time”, he is plagued by his knowledge and weeps when he tells the poor man of Sheney of the future and past, which emphasizes how knowledge is more difficult to live with than ignorance.

Another science fiction novel I enjoyed that deals with the idea of knowing the future is The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. In this novel, the protagonist, Henry, often knows what is going to happen to him when he travels into his own time line; he even has to watch his mother’s car crash a large number of times, unable to stop it from happening. Knowing his future does not help him change it and, in a lot of instances, the fact that he knows the future aids its fulfillment. He only meets his (future) wife, Claire, because he travels to her garden when she is young and then she seeks him out when she is older. This begs the question “where does the event start”? He first meets her when he is 28 and she is 20 because she has known him since she was six. She has been seeing him at various ages for most of the intervening time. It is also suggested that he only travels back to her when she was young because she is an important part of his life. Claire gets quite frustrated with the idea that her future has already been decided for her in some parts and feels that she has no choice. Knowing the future is both a blessing and a curse for Henry. Although knowing the future can sometimes save Henry  a lot of trouble he still chooses to not tell his younger self much about future, so  he can live like a normal person.

Both of these novels discuss whether or not it is wise to look for knowledge of the future. Genly Ai does not understand why people who possess the ability to foresee would not want to use it, but the people of Gethen (in particular the Handdara) see the knowledge as a burden. Similarly, Claire constantly wants to know more about the future but Henry is hesitant to tell her or even to learn it for himself. The next novel, Kindred, also deals with time travel so I hope that this theme will be further explored.