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introspectrive t1_j3yncf8 wrote

Reply to comment by Are_You_Illiterate in "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Leguin affected me like few books have done by feanor_imc

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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