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introspectrive t1_j3wdgyo wrote

It’s really one of the very great short stories, and one that is hard to forget about.

I recommend reading N.K. Jemisins „The Ones Who Stay and Fight“, which was written as a reply to Omelas. My opinion on it is a lot more split, but it is worth reading.

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Are_You_Illiterate t1_j3yl1gx wrote

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.

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introspectrive t1_j3yncf8 wrote

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.

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Neverwhere69 t1_j3ysmde wrote

Aye. Jemisin’s story seems, for lack of a better term, mean spirited, as though she were personally offended by Omelas.

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ColdCoffee31 t1_j40384a wrote

In an interview in the Paris Review, NK Jamison said:

“With Le Guin’s story, at the end of it, she’s suggesting that the only way to create a society that is a better place is to walk away from this one or to go off the grid. That’s not really what she’s saying, specifically, but that’s what a lot of people have concluded. But no, you’ve got to fix it, especially when there’s nowhere to walk away to. You go anywhere else in our current world and you’re either being completely exploited by capitalism or somewhat exploited by capitalism. So, I mean, it’s just a question of what kind of suffering you want to put yourself through.”

That comment (and others from the interview) demonstrate that Jemisin does get the original questions and points Leguin is trying to make with Omelas. It’s pretty easy to draw the line from Le Guin’s critique of our cultural mindset in Omelas (there’s that paragraph or two where she says the people are happy but she invents the suffering child because to us, we are unable to believe any society could be happy without at least someone suffering) to Jemisin’s argument that such a world with no widespread human-caused suffering or pain is something we have to fight to create and maintain. The title is in conversation with and exploring the meaning of “walking away.” I think Le Guin would agree considering she called Odo, the anti-capitalist revolutionary and founding member of the Anarchist society from The Dispossessed, “one who walked away from Omelas.” I can’t remember which essay she mentioned that in.

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mistiklest t1_j3z90h3 wrote

I think part of the problem for me, at least, is that I don't see any significant moral difference between Um-Helat and Omelas, yet they're presented by Jemisin as if they're somehow different. The only difference I can see is the number of sufferers, and Jemisin seems, in the end, to present Um-Helat as desirable, but the suffering of the child in Omelas as undesireable.

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Gardah229 t1_j3ygbb1 wrote

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...

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Miss_Speller t1_j3z4k1s wrote

It's possible that you could be mixing it up with her story The Day Before the Revolution that describes Odo, the woman who started the anarchist revolution at the heart of The Dispossessed. In her introduction to the story in The Wind's Twelve Quarters, LeGuin describes Odo as "one of the ones who walked away from Omelas." (Though she clearly means that in a very figurative sense; it's not at all set in the same world as Omelas.)

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Gardah229 t1_j3z7ngh wrote

That's certainly ringing some bells, so I think you're bang on. I've only read The Direction of The Road, and Omelas, so my wider LeGuin knowledge is pretty thin. Must have over-egged the connection in my head. I'll have to give that a read all the same now it's got my attention.

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Miss_Speller t1_j3z92fo wrote

It's a lovely story; it and Omelas bring a tear to my eye each time I read them. It would be best to read it after reading Dispossessed so you know just who Odo is and what a change she made in her world, but it's a treasure on its own.

Edit: I'm re-reading it now, and this jumped out at me as relevant to the theme of Omelas:

>There would not be slums like this, if the Revolution prevailed. But there would be misery. There would always be misery, waste, cruelty. She had never pretended to be changing the human condition, to be Mama taking tragedy away from the children so they won't hurt themselves. Anything but. So long as people were free to choose, if they chose to drink flybane and live in sewers, it was their business. Just so long as it wasn't the business of Business, the source of profit and the means of power for other people.

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introspectrive t1_j3ygf2i wrote

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

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Gardah229 t1_j3yj44l wrote

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

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Neverwhere69 t1_j3ysaok wrote

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

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dieinafirenazi t1_j3wwvcw wrote

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.

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bettinafairchild t1_j3y8jn4 wrote

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.

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