Quote by Ursula K. Le Guin: “The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.”

If you knew exactly what was going to happen, there would be no genuine choice, no surprise, and no real life — only a script being read out. Le Guin suggests that uncertainty, as uncomfortable as it is, is the very thing that makes experience real and choices meaningful.

Le Guin wrote The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969, during a period of enormous social transformation in America. The moon landing and the ongoing Vietnam War were happening simultaneously, and her novel — exploring a world without fixed gender — asked fundamental questions about what human nature actually requires.

American author of science fiction and fantasy whose works, including The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, explored gender, anarchism, and ecology with philosophical depth. She received numerous Hugo and Nebula awards and is widely regarded as one of the greatest American prose writers of the twentieth century.