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The new Omelas story
Normally, I would talk about this on my sf/f(/general writing) accounts if I was going to do it at all, but my brain is kind of chewing on Isabel J. Kim's "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole" in a way that feels more suited to the fandom side of things, so.
I've seen people calling the style "terminally online" and, hmm, yeah. But it feels deliberately grating to me in a way that fits what this story is doing. It doesn't clash with its own function and purposes—I think the dark comedy and social media references etc work (for me) because the story is very much more about Omelas discourse (and political discourse/activity more broadly) than about Le Guin's original story. I think it's especially effective as an indictment of the attempts to "solve" Omelas in a cutting through the Gordian knot kind of way: "why don't they just xyz" "if I were there, I would just..." etc rather than actually engaging with the conditions set by the original story, the kind of story it is, anything.
But it is, also, re-purposing the framework of Le Guin's story to do this, so the comparison is kind of inevitable. And while the breezy, snarky, social media-y style works internally, the clash with Le Guin's serious, vivid, rich prose in the original "Omelas" is very striking, and I think that's partly why it's grating on some people.
Put another way, I feel like Kim's version works on its own terms but does not work as ... fanfic, basically? It's not truly trying to be fanfic of Le Guin's story even in a loose sense (IMO), so it doesn't feel fair to look at it that way, but it does use Le Guin's story in a rather fanficcy way while being so jarringly dissimilar from it that I'd kind of hate it if it were fanfic. And I feel that some of the discussion is essentially treating it solely as "how does it function as Ursula K. Le Guin fanfic" and not engaging with it on its own terms. It does invite some of that, but I think a fair reading has to use both sets of goggles.
One of my main takeaways, honestly, is something I didn't remember about the original story until I re-read it just now: the Omelas child in the original short story is pretty ambiguous, I think? The story presents the utopia in stages and keeps questioning the audience about what they find so unbelievable about it, allows for different possibilities of the nature of Omelas, and presents the child in specific response to the audience's insistence that there must be some secret horror behind utopia. It's not to say that, for sure, there is no child and it's only about ~~~narrative or whatever, just that the child is there in at least some part because we demand that there be one, and that demand is what ultimately gives the story/fable its shape. And this seems strangely overlooked by the evergreen Omelas Discourse.
(Kim engages with this a bit, sideways, but only a bit IMO. The framework of the child mostly serves a very different and much more literal function in her story.)
But it is, also, re-purposing the framework of Le Guin's story to do this, so the comparison is kind of inevitable. And while the breezy, snarky, social media-y style works internally, the clash with Le Guin's serious, vivid, rich prose in the original "Omelas" is very striking, and I think that's partly why it's grating on some people.
Put another way, I feel like Kim's version works on its own terms but does not work as ... fanfic, basically? It's not truly trying to be fanfic of Le Guin's story even in a loose sense (IMO), so it doesn't feel fair to look at it that way, but it does use Le Guin's story in a rather fanficcy way while being so jarringly dissimilar from it that I'd kind of hate it if it were fanfic. And I feel that some of the discussion is essentially treating it solely as "how does it function as Ursula K. Le Guin fanfic" and not engaging with it on its own terms. It does invite some of that, but I think a fair reading has to use both sets of goggles.
One of my main takeaways, honestly, is something I didn't remember about the original story until I re-read it just now: the Omelas child in the original short story is pretty ambiguous, I think? The story presents the utopia in stages and keeps questioning the audience about what they find so unbelievable about it, allows for different possibilities of the nature of Omelas, and presents the child in specific response to the audience's insistence that there must be some secret horror behind utopia. It's not to say that, for sure, there is no child and it's only about ~~~narrative or whatever, just that the child is there in at least some part because we demand that there be one, and that demand is what ultimately gives the story/fable its shape. And this seems strangely overlooked by the evergreen Omelas Discourse.
(Kim engages with this a bit, sideways, but only a bit IMO. The framework of the child mostly serves a very different and much more literal function in her story.)
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EDIT: Well, I suppose it's not hypocritical if you think the primary problem with Omelas is that people don't think about the violence inherent to the system much, rather than the violence itself. Also I still haven't actually read the original story but maybe I will now, to compare.
EDIT 2: I just read the original story and wow, ok. There's no point saving the child, not just because that would hurt the city, but because the child is too intellectually disabled and traumatised to understand joy. There's other interesting things going on in the story but... ok then :/ I realise it's all a metaphor but as a metaphor that's still unfortunate.
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I do think Kim's story touches on that element a bit (I felt like it was poking fun at the murderer's "accelerationist" logic of stopping the suffering of children by sacrificing child after child to bring about the revolution For The Children or whatever), but yeah, a lot of people talked around that (as well as around the inevitability of the child's suffering in the original story being framed as an indictment of the audience).
I realise it's all a metaphor but as a metaphor that's still unfortunate.
Yeah, for sure. IIRC the story says that, if the child could be freed and cared for and comforted, that would be good in itself (while also meaning disaster for the larger city), but also I definitely got the impression that (within the story) the child has been so deeply damaged by their hellish existence that this could only accomplish so much.
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Omelas is a lot more ambiguous and ambivalent than I'd picked up from osmosis, too. People act like it's a simple "would you walk away?" hypothetical, but it's more trying to get the reader to consider the nature of utopia as an idea in general.
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I totally agree!
Omelas is a lot more ambiguous and ambivalent than I'd picked up from osmosis, too. People act like it's a simple "would you walk away?" hypothetical, but it's more trying to get the reader to consider the nature of utopia as an idea in general.
Yup. I think the framing of "you won't believe this unless there's a secret atrocity, so here's your secret atrocity and here's what that dynamic maybe looks like" is fundamentally about the conceptualization of utopia.