THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELAS by Ursula Le Guin

Rating: A glistening Fabergé egg

Highlight of note: This is not the first time I've been exposed to the moral question behind this story, but it felt much more real this time. Oddly enough, I feel that Le Guin's repeated breaking of the fourth wall is part of why.

Would you read more by this author? Oh, yes. I was actually thinking recently that there are books by her I have never read and that I should fix that, but this solidifies that. I also need to figure out where my copy of her book on writing is hiding, because she was certainly someone who knew what she was talking about.


This story is more of a setting than a complete tale. It describes a place, the city of Omelas, and its society and the conditions under which it thrives. Yet it is captivating and powerful.

Things start out rather slowly as Le Guin contrasts the world of the Omelas, who reside in a joyful Utopia, to an exaggerated (or perhaps merely overstated) version of our own jaded reality. I was starting to tune out and wonder why the story had been recommended to me when I hit this line, "...I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy." This struck me as writing advice to someone who is doing an erotic novel for NaNo. The usual advice is that if you get bored, you should add ninjas, but surely in an erotica, an orgy would make more sense. Anyway, it amused me into continuing to read.

A few lines later, the writing delivers a complete punch to the gut and I suddenly realized why Le Guin mentioned Dostoyevsky in the intro despite my shoddy memory of The Brothers Karamazov. I'm not going to describe what's written in any more detail because I don't feel I'd add to many people's understandings if they've already read it and I fear spoiling its impact for any who have not. I will say that I feel Le Guin did a better, or at least more emotionally evocative, job of presenting the scenario than her Russian predecessor.

The version of the story I borrow from my library came with an afterword written in 2016 in which Le Guin discussed some of the responses people wrote her with. While discussing this, she wrote, "In talking about the meaning of a story, we need to be careful not to diminish it, impoverish it. A story can say different things to different people. It may have no definitive reading." She then tells of a response that challenged her own understanding of the work years after it was written. That's what kind of story this is: the sort of deep exploration of existence where even the author has trouble identifying what is meant by it. It is complex and painfully beautiful. If you haven't read it, you should remedy that.