The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas • 1973 • Utopia short story by Ursula K. Le Guin

★★★★★

Synopsis: The seaside city Omelas is a blissful and heavenly utopia: people are happy, there is no violence, or terror, things are good, The Festival of Summer is running. But the easy living comes with a price: one single child is put away in a cellar, getting no attention at all, and lives a miserable life. Everyone in Omelas knows about this sacrifice, but if anybody would care for the child, the utopia would be destroyed by some unknown force. Most people live with this misery swept under the carpet. And then, there are those who cannot stand it, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Review:

This story is no story, it has no plot, no main character, it is a critique of (American) moral life. It describes in vivid descriptions a philosophical concept which is an extension of William James’s essay The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life (or Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov): a utopia which relies on the suffering of a single person can only be wrong.

The title concentrates on (one form of) the logical consequence that morale persons would take. It can be understood as an argument against utilitarianism. For Trekkies, there is Spock’s often cited “Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” (cf. Wrath of Khan). Or read it as a parable of first world exploitation of poorer countries: Think about all the children workers in the Lithium mines of D.R. Kongo just to get you a nice cellphone.

To add a grain of salt to the story, Le Guin put in some of her political topics to this utopian vision – she adds free sex, and religion without temples or clergy:

I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don’t hesitate.

There are also drugs,

which first brings a great lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs, and then after some hours a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions at last of the very arcana and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as exciting the pleasure of sex beyond all belief; and it is not habit-forming

Though it doesn’t work as a short story at all, it resonates – far better because easier accessible than James’s complicate philosophical essay. Would you walk away? Or take the easy path and stay? Those are the two answers induced by Le Guin directly. Since my first reads, I’ve learned that this story is heavily treated in U.S. schools and universities and thus is the best known story of Le Guin to a broader audience. Thus, third choices have been found, and brilliant author N.K. Jemisin is not the only one to say: Let’s stay and fix it (cf. her story “The Ones Who Stay and Fight”).

One small, but interesting side fact is the question of the origins of the word “Omelas” – Le Guin read beackwards a road sign ‘Salem (Oregon)’ – an hours drive away from her home Portland in Oregon; yes, the same town invaded by military police these days. There you have one of several connections to our times. But it can also be read differently: “Homme helas“, the Greek human. Jemisin turned that to Um-Helat in her answer to Le Guin’s story.

In my last review, written in 2017, I noted the following: “I’m pretty sure that nowadays it wouldn’t win the puppy polluted Hugo Awards like it did in 1974. Where people back in the 1970s in a different mind set than now?” Now, in 2020, I have more hope – the puppies are mostly gone, the pendulum swung to the other extreme of voting for diversity.

The story is just as relevant as ever – back in 1975, Le Guin expressed in her introduction to the story

The dilemma of the American conscience can hardly be better stated.

With all the #BlackLiveMatters of our days, this still holds. Not only in the U.S.A., but also in Europe and everywhere else.

Meta: isfdb. This SF short story appeared 1973 in robert Silverberg’s New Dimensions 3. I read it 2017 in her anthology The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, and again 2020 in Lost and Found. It won the 1974 Hugo Award. For further literary analysis, you might want to check out Jerre Collins’s “Leaving Omelas: Questions of Faith and Understanding” or Julia Faragher’s “Rethinking Utopia“.