Introducing the short work in her 2012 collection The Unreal and the Real, Volume Two, Le Guin noted that The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas "has a long and happy career of being used by teachers to upset students and make them argue fiercely about morality." Ī 2017 commentary in the online science fiction magazine Tor.com suggested that the story explored and challenged conceptions of genre as much as those of ethics, and said that it "packs quite a punch for such a short piece". It was republished in the second volume of the short-story anthology The Unreal and the Real in 2014. It has also appeared as an independently published, 31-page hardcover book for young adults in 1993. It was reprinted in Le Guin's The Wind's Twelve Quarters in 1975, and has been frequently anthologized elsewhere. Le Guin's piece was originally published in New Dimensions 3, a hard-cover science fiction anthology edited by Robert Silverberg, in October 1973. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a sceptical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain? Publication and legacy
Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. But when I met it in James' ' The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,' it was with a shock of recognition." The fact is, I haven't been able to re-read Dostoyevsky, much as I loved him, since I was twenty-five, and I'd simply forgotten he used the idea. "The central idea of this psychomyth, the scapegoat", writes Le Guin, "turns up in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov, and several people have asked me, rather suspiciously, why I gave the credit to William James. Le Guin?' From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally.
Le Guin hit upon the name of the town on seeing a road sign for Salem, Oregon, in a car mirror. Le Guin stated that the city's name is pronounced "OH-meh-lahss". But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas." The story ends with "The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. However, a few citizens, young and old, silently walk away from the city, and no one knows where they go. Once citizens are old enough to know the truth, most, though initially shocked and disgusted, ultimately acquiesce to this one injustice that secures the happiness of the rest of the city. The city's constant state of serenity and splendor requires that a single unfortunate child be kept in perpetual filth, darkness, and misery. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all." Everything about Omelas is so abundantly pleasing that the narrator decides the reader is not yet truly convinced of its existence and so elaborates upon the final element of the city: its one atrocity. The narrator reflects that "Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. The specific socio-politico-economic setup of the community is not mentioned the narrator merely claims not to be sure of every particular. Omelas has no kings, soldiers, priests, or slaves. The vibrant festival atmosphere, however, seems to be an everyday characteristic of the blissful community, whose citizens, though limited in their advanced technology and communal (rather than private) resources, are still intelligent, sophisticated, and cultured. In Omelas, the summer solstice is celebrated with a glorious festival and a race featuring young people on horseback. The only chronological element of the work is that it begins by describing the first day of summer in Omelas, a shimmering city of unbelievable happiness and delight.
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