Omelas, Je T’Aime

Le Guin’s timeless tale of cruelty and inaction poses a question that none of us can answer. But that hasn’t stopped people from trying.

by Kurt Schiller // Illustration by J.R. Bolt

[For more discussion of “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” and its various response stories, check out this episode of the Rite Gud podcast.]

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The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas is a work of almost flawless ambiguity.

At once universally applicable and devilishly vague, Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1973 short story examines a perfect utopia built around the perpetuation of unimaginable cruelty upon a helpless, destitute child. It spans a mere 2800 words and yet evokes a thousand social ills past and present, real and possible, in the mind of the reader—all the while committing to precisely none of them. 

Is it about income inequality? Unequal treatment under the criminal justice system? The tension between extractive bourgeois and extracted proletariat? Any one of these would feel simplistic in the face of the story itself, which bucks and weaves between gentle fable and pointed taunt, never quite allowing the reader to get their footing, leaving them to marinate in unease and uncertainty over what somehow feels like a pointed accusation despite never—quite—being spoken aloud.

One moment Le Guin dwells on rich descriptions of the Omelans’ happy lives (parades, horses with braided manes, jolly flute music), the next she interrogates the reader about whether they believe the utopia laid out before them is even possible, while hinting darkly at the revelation to come. And once the titular “ones who walk away” do appear—those unhappy Omelans who, once they know the horrible secret, can no longer stomach their utopia and wander off into the desert in desperate search of something else—it is not to give the reader relief or a sense of shared triumph over a cruel system, but to simultaneously implicate us for our own inactions and remind us that moral righteousness alone is not enough to guarantee happiness and success.

“Omelas” is a masterpiece, a fable that is all the more gripping for its puzzling lack of moral. But this powerful ambiguity is at the heart of both the story’s staying power and its strange ability to confound both readers and other writers—a pointed refusal to provide an easy answer that makes the story so good, so lasting, and so effective, and yet simultaneously such a broad target for misguided interpretations and bad-faith criticism alike.

* * * * *

Fiction almost always invites a response at some level, and a story as pointed and intentional as “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” practically begs for one. And so it is little surprise that more than a few authors have heeded this subliminal call and written stories in response to the moral conundrum laid out by Le Guin’s original story.

These pieces range from the utterly prosaic to the fantastical. They are long—some considerably longer than Le Guin’s brisk original—and they are short, some merely a paragraph or two in length. Some read more like essays (and might have been better written as one), whereas others seek to spin Le Guin’s tale out into a longer or parallel vision, one which might stand more or less on its own.

A typical example of the modern, more conventional “Omelas” response story is “The Ones Who Don’t Walk Away,” by Sean Vivier, published in Daily Science Fiction. Vivier’s piece is straight to the point, picking up precisely where Le Guin leaves off, and offering an enthusiastic counterpoint:

A lot is made of those who walk away from the city. And I get it. I do. It's a shock to learn the city's secret. That a child must suffer for our prosperity. Of course it breaks a lot of people. Of course they walk away. Of course they abandon their civic duty.  

Vivier’s piece is quite short and worth reading in full, but the gist of it is that—like a great many Omelas responses, which almost invariably find fault with Le Guin’s underlying premise—“The Ones Who Don’t Walk Away” re-casts “Omelas” as a sort of paean to giving up, subtextually linking Le Guin’s “ones who walk away” with people who simply leave society rather than try to improve it. Rather than “stay and fight” for their city’s soul, the unnamed narrator describes those who would leave Omelas as “abandon[ing] our home to damnation.” 

The story goes on to describe some possible routes for improving the society of Omelas, and for coping with the agony of knowing the evil deed on which its prosperity rests. You could, the narrator suggests, argue with the complacent and write essays, speaking up for the mistreated. You could organize campaigns and run for local office. You could try to rescue the child, or even offer to take the child’s place yourself (which leads to an admittedly funny aside about a masochist who offers to be tortured in the child’s place, because he would at least enjoy it).

Responses to “Omelas” almost invariably find fault with Le Guin’s underlying premise.

The narrator’s personal choice, though, is to show compassion for the child:

As for me, I do the only thing I know how. I come to the child at the heart of the city. I talk to her. I listen to her. I play with her and I teach her. I try to mitigate the worst of it. And whenever she cries in sudden and terrified pain, I rush and I hold her. If all I can do is comfort a hurt child in agony, then that will be my part in all this.

As nice as the sentiment of “The Ones Who Don’t Walk Away” may seem at first glance, it depends on both a fundamental misreading of Le Guin’s work and a refusal to engage with the difficult questions the original poses. The idea of reforming Omelas is a pleasant idea, to be sure, but it is one that Le Guin herself specifically tells us is not an option. No reform of Omelas is possible—at least, not without destroying Omelas itself: 

If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms.

“Those are the terms”, indeed. Le Guin’s original story is careful to cast the underlying evil of Omelas as un-addressable—not, as some have suggested, to “cheat” or create a false dilemma, but as an intentionally insurmountable challenge to the reader. The premise of Omelas feels unfair because it is meant to be unfair. Instead of racing to find a clever solution (“Free the child! Replace it with a robot! Have everyone suffer a little bit instead of one person all at once!”), the reader is forced to consider how they might cope with moral injustice that is so foundational to their very way of life that it cannot be undone. Confronted with the choice to give up your entire way of life or allow someone else to suffer, what do you do? Do you stay and enjoy the fruits of their pain? Or do you reject this devil’s compromise at your own expense, even knowing that it may not even help? And through implication, we are then forced to consider whether we are—at this very moment!—already in exactly this situation. At what cost does our happiness come? And, even more significantly, at whose expense? And what, in fact, can be done? Can anything?

This is the essential and agonizing question that Le Guin poses, and we avoid it at our peril. It’s easy, but thoroughly besides the point, to say—as the narrator of “The Ones Who Don’t Walk Away” does—that you would simply keep the nice things about Omelas, and work to address the bad. You might as well say that you would solve the trolley problem by putting rockets on the trolley and having it jump over the people tied to the tracks. Le Guin’s challenge is one that can only be resolved by introspection, because the challenge is one levied against the discomforting awareness of our own complicity; to “reject the premise” is to reject this (all too real) discomfort in favor of empty wish fulfillment. A happy fairytale about the nobility of our imagined efforts against a hypothetical evil profits no one but ourselves (and I would argue that in the long run it robs us as well).

But in addition to being morally evasive, treating Omelas as a puzzle to be solved (or as a piece of straightforward didactic moralism) also flattens the depth of the original story. We are not really meant to understand Le Guin’s “walking away” as a literal abandonment of a problem, nor as a self-satisfied “Sounds bad, but I’m outta here”, the way Vivier’s response piece or others of its ilk do; rather, it is framed as a rejection of complacency. This is why those who leave are shown not as triumphant heroes, but as harried and desperate fools; hopeless, troubled souls setting forth on a journey that may well be doomed from the start—because isn’t that the fate of most people who set out to fight the injustices they see, and that they cannot help but see once they have been made aware of it? The story is a metaphor, not a math problem, and “walking away” might just as easily encompass any form of sincere and fully committed struggle against injustice: a lonely, often thankless journey, yet one which is no less essential for its difficulty.

Tellingly, the only options that “The Ones Who Don’t Walk Away” speaks of negatively are direct action (in this case rescuing the child, which the story tells us is very difficult and would likely destroy the city—to which I say, “Good?”) and actual violence: [T]hat child suffers, only now more suffer with her. Our opponents take them and use them as proof that no one need pay attention to our ideas.

The merits of political violence aside, taken in the context of Le Guin’s original story, the overall effect of Vivier’s response is to suggest that the only viable ways forward are gentle reform which even its proponents admit is thoroughly inadequate, or—in the case of the narrator—kind words and compassion that, however well-meaning, admittedly do nothing to solve the actual problem. And that is a fatalism far greater than any you could accuse Le Guin of harboring.

* * * * *

It would be fair to observe that this article has now spent considerably more words criticizing a piece of flash fiction than the flash fiction itself, and is indeed rapidly approaching the length of Le Guin’s original work, and with considerably less effect. So let us turn instead to by far the most critically lauded piece of fiction in the broader Omelas canon, “The Ones Who Stay And Fight” by N.K. Jemisin, originally published in her 2018 anthology How Long Til Black Future Month and later reprinted in Lightspeed Magazine.

Jemisin’s response piece concerns not Omelas, but its sister-city of Um-Helat, which is described to us at length in language tellingly similar to Le Guin’s dystopian utopia (Omelas itself is referred to within the story as a “tick of a city, fat and happy with its head buried in a tortured child”). There are wondrous birds in Um-Helat, and parades, and happy laughter and lovely dyed silks. There are scenic rivers and calm oceans, and everyone is respected and treated equally and equitably—a fact which is emphasized at considerable length, with a great deal of the story’s detail concerning not just the physical splendor, but the basic decency and fairness of Um-Helat, even if it is admittedly a work-in-progress:

If one wanders the streets where the workers and artisans do their work, there are slightly more people with dark skin; if one strolls the corridors of the executive tower, there are a few extra done in pale. There is history rather than malice in this, and it is still being actively, intentionally corrected—because the people of Um-Helat are not naive believers in good intentions as the solution to all ills. No, there are no worshippers of mere tolerance here, nor desperate grovelers for that grudging pittance of respect which is diversity. Um-Helatians are learned enough to understand what must be done to make the world better, and pragmatic enough to actually enact it.

In Um-Helat, all people are of equal value and worth, a state of affairs which is maintained through strict informational purity and strident suppression of the idea that some people might be worth more than others. Jemisin is at pains to point out that Um-Helat is not a stand-in for our world, but another realm entirely—a critical detail, because Um-Helatians are at risk of “catching” the idea of inequality by spying on our world through a sort of illicit quantum radio. When this happens, the affected Um-Helatians are hunted down by social workers and then killed by jamming a beautifully wrought spear through their spine and heart. The children of these unfortunates, who will likely have been infected by the idea of inequality themselves, are given a chance at redemption through compassion: to bury the dead and heal, recognizing their execution not as cruelty but as kindness, and the cost of a just world.

Jemisin concludes the piece by chiding the reader for being unable to believe in a utopia without dystopian flaws, outlining the moral of Um-Helat, and then encouraging the reader to use this knowledge to take up the Um-Helatian cause in our own world:

Does the possibility of harsh enforcement add enough realism? Are you better able to accept this postcolonial utopia now that you see its bloody teeth? Ah, but they did not choose this battle, the people of Um-Helat today; their ancestors did, when they spun lies and ignored conscience in order to profit from others’ pain. Their greed became a philosophy, a religion, a series of nations, all built on blood. Um-Helat has chosen to be better. But sometimes, only by blood sacrifice may true evil be kept at bay.

It is difficult to know where to start with “The Ones Who Stay And Fight.” A great deal of praise has been heaped upon it as an update to (or repudiation of) Le Guin’s original, expanding its allegedly narrow focus on injustice to encompass inequality of gender, race, sexuality, and class; and likewise the way it seeks to be in simultaneous dialogue with not just Omelas but a handful of other dystopias (Harrison Bergeron in particular) and contemporary politics, to boot.

To my eye, though, it is a story that mostly winds up being in dialogue with itself, to its considerable detriment. Where Le Guin’s flowing prose seeks at first to stand on its own (before pivoting gently into the more pointed interrogation of the reader, so subtly that you might not notice it on a first read), Jemisin’s story declares itself to be a piece of meta-fiction directly in the title, then rushes to place frequent allusions and references before the reader as if reassuring us that the moral will be along in just a moment. It leans heavily on the accusatory tone adopted later in Le Guin’s story, but overdoes it by half while simultaneously twisting it from discursive and sad to condescending and triumphant; ”The Ones Who Stay And Fight” is forever addressing the reader as ‘friend’ or ‘little friend’, always talking down to us, always chiding us about the evils of our own world and demanding that we do better, but never actually gives us a moment to reflect on those injustices and our complicity in them. Le Guin did not enumerate the particular injustices that we can recognize in 2022 but may have been oblivious to in 1973, no—and she does not have to. The ambiguity of her story allows it to work as a cipher, rather than a period piece; one need not agree with Le Guin’s particular worldview to come away feeling complicit in the injustice from which we benefit. We bring that complicity with us. By presenting a laundry list of specific injustices rather than a single evocative centerpiece, Jemisin turns a broad cry that is applicable to any reader and any era into a headline that reflects this moment and instant, culturally and politically. Jemisin’s story is in such a rush to justify its existence and deliver its message that it never gives itself a chance to breathe, shouting the punchline before telling the joke.

Jemisin’s story rushes to deliver references and allusions, as if reassuring us that the moral will be along in just a moment.

And after all that build-up the grand conclusion of “The Ones Who Stay And Fight” is the (admittedly true but also redundant in light of the story to which it is responding) declaration that for a better world to be possible, we need to believe in it, and we need to fight for it:

​​The child needs you, too, don’t you see? You also have to fight for her, now that you know she exists, or walking away is meaningless. Here, here is my hand. Take it. Please.

Good. Good.

Now. Let’s get to work.

Jemisin’s piece ultimately fails because it takes Le Guin’s clarion call for honest self-reflection and reduces it to a flat call to unspecified arms, albeit one arbitrarily complicated by its remix of the premise. Both stories feature their own sort of dystopia—What else would you call a society that maintains utopia by executing people in the street with specialized spine-piercing tridents?—but only in “Omelas” are we led to identify with the people actually sacrificing themselves to imagine a better world, however doomed or inadequate their efforts may be. Jemisin’s narrator chides us for our inability to imagine utopia, it’s true—something that Le Guin also does, but far more subtly—but then shows us a “utopia” that sounds like a half-measure compared to Omelas, and one that’s upheld by frequent spine-spearing, to boot. Is this what we were supposed to imagine?

Similarly, Jemisin’s open-ended narrative questions and dodgy narrator come across like an attempt to walk the same ambiguous path as Le Guin, but it’s one that’s navigated with considerably less sure-footedness. Rather than leading us deeper into the story and allowing us to arrive at Omelas’s unsettling conclusion on our own, Jemisin’s ambiguity pushes us back, even as its overt moralizing drags us headlong to the point it wishes to make, as if constructing an elaborate labyrinth for us to explore but then worrying that we might get lost along the way. And rather than create meaning, it erodes it. Are we meant to think it’s good that their utopia is upheld by instant executions, and identify with those “fighting” for utopia? Or are we meant to identify with the ones yelling in the street about the injustice of pike-murder? (A facet Jemisin casts, not entirely convincingly, as a form of inequality itself, prioritizing the survival of one over the needs of society.) Are we meant to believe the cajoling, mocking narrator or not? Did they just make up the whole execution thing to make a point? (Or perhaps it’s a far subtler gambit, and the point is that we should listen when narrators speak the truth, even if they are very annoying about it.)

In a vacuum, any of these complications might have lent added depth to the story. We might for instance be led to question whether this utopia was worth the cost, if enforced ignorance was the cost to maintain it; it might alternately challenge us about whether a system with a little bit of injustice isn’t better than one with the burning fire of moral purity and its consequences, and what exactly “fighting for utopia” means. Instead, they twist and turn and undercut each other until the reader is left with little to grasp onto. The story ends in a pointed call to action, but what actual action are we being exhorted to? Didn’t we just read a story about cops who execute people for listening to the radio? If Jemisin meant to emphasize the need for sacrifice to achieve justice, she might have done so with a sacrifice as devilishly appealing-yet-repulsive as the one laid out by Le Guin, rather than the easily refutable “kill people if they break the rules.” If the question it meant to pose is, “Is it worth it?”, the answer seems like a fairly straightforward, “No, of course not.” 

I ultimately find “The Ones Who Stay And Fight” so unsatisfying precisely because it is actually, more or less, in agreement with Le Guin’s original story. In an interview with The Paris Review, Jemisin had this to say about the story:

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. 

A True Utopia: An Interview With N. K. Jemisin, The Paris Review

And later, concerning her own story:

Can you have a utopian society without somebody somewhere suffering? What would that life be like if no one suffered? And the only way that I could do it was to basically point out that the flaw is ideological. The idea that you have to have someone suffering is the flaw. So, this is a society that is utopian as long as they keep at bay the idea that somebody’s got to suffer.

Everything Jemisin says here is more or less what I love about the original story—the idea that you need to fight for a better world, the idea that you need to believe such a place is possible, and the idea that you must do so even at great cost and with unknown chances of success. This invites the question, then, of why write a response in the first place, other than to take what was a series of subtle points and make them explicit? (And why, for that matter, the exuberant response and common perception that Jemisin’s story had somehow refuted or reworked Le Guin’s?)

From Jemisin’s first quote, it’s unclear whether or not she agrees with the simplified interpretation of Le Guin’s story—the same simplified interpretation that Vivier relies upon, in fact. If so, she has merely repeated the mistake. But if not—if she has rightly identified that people have misconstrued the meaning of Le Guin’s original—perhaps the intent of “The Ones Who Stay And Fight” is to make the same point (that a better world is worth fighting for, even at great cost), but in more explicit and precise terms? This would be a noble, if artistically dubious, goal; but even if that were the case, Jemisin winds up at cross-purposes by imagining a new and genuine dystopia, which runs entirely contrary to the stated agenda of imagining a just world with minimal suffering. Because in the context of “The Ones Who Stay And Fight,” the better world worth fighting for—the one without injustice—is also the world with all the spine-stabbing. And if spine-evisceration is essential to the Um-Helatian utopia, it would seem that Um-Helat is merely another tick-like Omelas, but profiting off the suffering of rule-breakers rather than a child. Is this less egregious because the child is “innocent”, and the Um-Helatian heretics supposedly brought it on themselves?

And so on—this circular reasoning never actually resolves anywhere satisfactory. Even setting aside my own stylistic complaints about the story (principally, its blunting of Le Guin’s sparse prose with the forced intensity and awkward profanity of a righteous Twitter thread), this is simply too much meaning for one story, even one pinned to a frame of such sturdiness as Le Guin’s original. “The Ones Who Stay And Fight” ultimately comes apart at the seams, leaving behind the appearance of importance, but with little of import to say.

* * * * *

Both Jemisin and Vivier make a mistake which is common to those seeking to respond to or criticize Omelas, and that is throwing out the ambiguity and evasiveness of Le Guin’s original. Vivier, in seeking to construct a straightforward response to a complex story, imagines a meaning far simpler and far less ambiguous than that which is actually present; while Jemisin, in seeking to dot every ‘I’ and cross every ‘T’, trades the durability of well crafted ambiguity for a cumbersome overabundance of interpretations.

Ambiguity, again, is at the heart of Omelas’s enduring success. The story has remained a favorite decades after its original publication, and the reason is its unsolvability. You cannot simply imagine a Good Omelas, not without sacrificing what makes the story work. Nor can you head off misinterpretation by making each and every possible meaning explicit and clear-cut—not in the same way, and certainly not without repeatedly contradicting your own intentions.

Ambiguity is the strength of Le Guin’s original, but it’s also this ambiguity that seems to frustrate so many modern readers. Contemporary takes on the story—including formal publications like the two we’ve discussed above, but also a thousand conversations dispersed across Twitter, LiveJournal, and the like—so often try to defeat it, either by imagining a solution or reading a specific, narrow meaning into the piece.

Some of this may be a result of the current trend in science fiction and fantasy to declare a story’s point of view right from the start: to grab the reader by the hand and say, “HEY, I’m about to deliver a parable… so listen up!” This is a tendency that now extends far beyond the text of the stories in question, having become part of the marketing as well; one need only browse Twitter or the website of a major publisher for a few minutes to find marketing copy to the effect of “Do you want to read a new story that grapples with the questions of class and climate change? Here it is!” Perhaps modern readers, expecting a clear signpost from Le Guin but finding none, have adopted a positively Omelian tendency to wander in search of meaning, certain that it is out there, somewhere, but not quite knowing the way.

In doing so, though, these readers are denying themselves the power and grace of Le Guin’s original story—because an Omelas without ambiguity is not an Omelas at all. Ambiguity breeds discomfort, and discomfort is ultimately in the mind of the reader, not within the text. We can be told that a world contains this problem or that problem, but none of that can compare to the horror of realizing our own moral inadequacy, as Le Guin’s original leads us to do. But her mastery is such that she does not seek to push us into such a realization—Le Guin merely digs the hole, and allows us to walk headlong into it entirely on our own.

To demand a clear point of view from Omelas—to search for a nice, neat answer—is ultimately to deny that discomfort, just as the Omelans who stay deny their own discomfort with the injustices of their world. For us, as readers, denying the discomfort of not having a concrete answer to the accusations Le Guin subtly levies is tantamount to denying the complexity, and the severity, of the injustices that give rise to it. We are uncomfortable not because Le Guin is tricking us, but because we know deep down that our world is sick, and a cure may not be readily at hand, no matter how hard we may fight, and no matter how much we wish it to be so. To think otherwise is itself a false utopia—the nice, warm feeling of thinking that we know the way forward and need only follow it, but which comes at the expense of the soul-searching needed to actually reject complacency, and the discomfort needed to force us to take those first steps toward change.

We should not, in the end, demand answers from a story like “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” It has none. And it is entirely possible that none exist. But that should not keep us from trying—and the most a story like Omelas can do is tell us to start walking.