The Ones Who Walk Away from The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread. Is that it?

It’s also in the introduction essay in The Unreal and the Real Volume 2: Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin: Outer Space & Inner Lands

I’d go take a picture to prove it, but I’m in bed and it’s cold.

It's absolutely fair to see different meanings in stories. My beef is that there's a kind of vulgar interpretation of the meaning you're taking that directly contradicts and undermines the meaning that I'm talking about.

When people talk about the story like Le Guin is asking them to leave city life, industrial agriculture, technology, meat eating etc, etc, behind, that feels to me like the same failure of imagination Le Guin is critiquing. You are siding with the people of Omelas that comfort and happiness require abominable suffering, and you're choosing instead to suffer yourself, or you're not even getting there and just assuming that if you do everything the people of Omelas don't (IE live like a hermit in the woods) you are somehow not part of that society or your truck or cult or whatever you have with you in the woods aren't also fueled by the suffering of others.

Obviously in the real world there are tradeoffs and someone doing better sometimes means other people have to suffer, but even in our current, broken world, there are a lot of things we could do that would make everyone better off that we sometimes can't do out of a bitter habit of seeing everything as zero sum. Just going off the things in the story, it's totally possible to imagine that we could have dense, walkable cities with good public transit, abundant cheap food and energy, street fairs, orgies, computers, whatever, and to have the continued operation of all of those things not require any suffering.

It’s likely you already felt stupid and do this second guessing nonsense to argue with yourself against the idea.

If you treat a story like a video game, you’re not reading. Reading is a direct, intimate experience. So long as you stand back from the characters and story as an observer with an agenda, you’re missing most of what your author has made for you.

Of course, if you only read genre fiction, the easy to read, plot heavy stuff that airport novels are made of, it doesn’t really matter. I suggest you read something more challenging. And stop guessing what’s next. Take in fully what you’re reading in the moment. No one wrote a novel to prove you stupid OR smart. Please stop missing the point so aggressively.

That’s part of what I think as well. Her story seems a bit critical of Le Guin‘s, and well, the best thing I can say in that case is that it’s nice that she has so much confidence.

I always felt that she somehow missed the point a bit, or offered a response that doesn’t work on the same level, but I can’t really formulate it well right now.

Still, it is a story well worth reading for the perspective.

The connection between Omelas and BTS’s Spring Day is what drove me to explore BTS’s discography even more (and then finding even more connections between their lyrics, videos, and books). The moment in their music video where the Omelas vacancy sign changes is very moving.

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is a masterpiece.

Stories can have multiple meanings, the best ones usually do. What I took away from this story was that reader’s are repulsed by the citizens of Omelas for allowing the child’s suffering to go on, meanwhile we are far from a Utopia in our world, but we do have some comforts which are available to us thanks to the suffering of not just one person but several. It’s about exploitation, suffering, and judging others. The idea that art holds up a mirror to society is a bit cliche but that’s what my experience reading this was, a mirror being held up.

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Just read them both. I get what she was doing but Jemisin definitely should have riffed off of someone else.

Her prose is but a pale shadow of Leguin's mastery. Held side-by-side, it shows.

Further research is leading me nowhere. Wishful thinking, it seems.

I really don't get how everyone's take away from this story is about whether or not they would walk away.

Le Guin is crystal clear from the beginning that The Ones Who Walk Away is a meta-fictional critique of how we think about Utopia and Dystopia. The most powerful passage is in the middle where she writes:

>Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas?
>
>They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians, I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. There were not less complex than us.
>
>The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.
>
>How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children--though their children were, in fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched. O miracle! But I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time.

The child suffering that is necessary to keep the utopia going and which leads some citizens to walk away in disgust appears when she concedes that we cannot even imagine the joy of utopian Omelas without making it a parable about how things can never be perfect. And the point of the people who walk away isn't that they're morally superior to everyone else, it's that they can imagine and are building a pure utopia that we cannot even imagine and LeGuin cannot even compellingly describe. And we should feel weird about it, why does a fairly realistic take on a post-scarcity world only feel real when we add a single suffering child, what the fuck does a lonely child crying have to do with whether or not the good life is possible?

To be one of the people who walks away isn't to give up your iphone or go vegan or whatever, it's to be able to conceive of and build a future where no sacrifice, no pain, no suffering is remotely necessary. You can have your iphone, and food that tastes like exactly like meat (whether it is or isn't meat is up to your imagination) or maybe even better, you can easily get anywhere and do anything as long as you aren't hurting anyone. But you aren't a protagonist, you aren't special, there is no hierarchy for you to work your way up through, there's no one to lord being better over, there isn't some secret shame to keep you endlessly moving forward. The real test of Omelas is whether you can imagine a world where you are happy even if no one, anywhere, has it worse then you.

Reading this out loud was my introduction to LeGuin. It's so brief, yet I enjoyed every second reading it like that. Dwelling on the imagery longer than I might if I were scanning the page sort of thing.

If she has, then I’ve never heard of it (and would be excited to read it!).

I may be plucking this right out of my arse, but didn't LeGuin also write a story that came after, directly focusing on what may have or did happen to the ones that walked away?

Or maybe I'm just getting mixed up with Jemisin's story...

There's also "The Ones Who Walk Away from The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," which sounds similar to the Jemisin story--stay and fight.

Wikipedia cites the source as Kennedy, X.J., and Dana Gioia (ed.): An Introduction to Fiction, 8th ed., page 274. Longman, 2004.

But it sounds like she talked about this on several occasions, probably in interviews. She also included the subtitle "Variations on a theme by William James" to indicate (what she thought was) the provenance of the idea.

People that read f&sf are weird

I don't know anybody who reads what I'm into. Most men I know read non fiction and women read literature, chick lit, self help

Everybody reads mysteries nobody reads fiction about post apocalyptic America.

That's my experience anyway and I ask everybody what they read

I go in 5 or 6 different houses a day and I always look for the book shelf. Nobody has anything good

you're reading it incredibly literally.

Read this once as a middle schooler and I still remember it/how I felt reading it.

Is this from an interview?

By the way, a writer wrote "The Ones Who Walk Away from The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" as a sort of sequel. You can look it up, it was in a recent issue of a popular SF magazine like Asimov's or something.

And there was an episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds this past year that features an Omelas-like situation.

I'd like to think I would walk away. I read it shortly after I went vegan and I realated to it.

The left hand of darkness had an equal effect on me. Absolutely loved it

My favorite le Guin is Always Coming Home, a very hopefully look at a post-climate catastrophe Earth which features one of the most realistic takes on what self aware AI would do. It's also a very interestingly written book, more of a collection of related works than one coherent novel.

Omelas is a very white liberal boomer story. My parents are both hippies who walked away from bougie families to live out in the woods, trying not to be part of a bad system. Of course in real life you can't really escape the system, but they tried and thanks to their privilege they could have land and freedom to raise some hippie kids and make a lot of art. Not a bad life at all, but also did they really change anything?

The Ones Who Stay and Fight seems to me to come from a much more grounded perspective. Walking away is just a safety valve for Omelas.