Welcome to today’s session of Season 3 of Short Fiction Book Club! Not sure what that means? No problem: here’s our FAQ explaining who we are, what we do, and when we do it. Mostly that’s talk about short fiction, on r/Fantasy, on Wednesdays. We’re glad you’re here!

Today, we’re discussing “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” an all-time short fiction classic, two modern responses to it, and our first essay discussion.

Participants are welcome to read one story or the full slate. I will start us off with some question prompts, but feel free to add your own. Come join us in the hole!

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin (2806 words, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters)

With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The ringing of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved.

The Ones Who Stay and Fight by N.K. Jemisin (3829 words, Lightspeed)

It’s the Day of Good Birds in the city of Um-Helat! The Day is a local custom, silly and random as so many local customs can be, and yet beautiful by the same token. It has little to do with birds—a fact about which locals cheerfully laugh, because that, too, is how local customs work. It is a day of fluttering and flight regardless, where pennants of brightly dyed silk plume forth from every window, and delicate drones of copperwire and featherglass—made for this day, and flown on no other!—waft and buzz on the wind. Even the monorail cars trail stylized flamingo feathers from their rooftops, although these are made of featherglass, too, since real flamingos do not fly at the speed of sound.

Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim (3190 words, Clarkesworld)

So they broke into the hole in the ground, and they killed the kid, and all the lights went out in Omelas: click, click, click. And the pipes burst and there was a sewage leak and the newscasters said there was a typhoon on the way, so they (a different “they,” these were the “they” in charge, the “they” who lived in the nice houses in Omelas [okay, every house in Omelas was a nice house, but these were Nice Houses]) got another kid and put it in the hole.

Essay: Omelas, Je T’Aime by Kurt Schiller (4712 words, Blood Knife)

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.

Upcoming Sessions

It’s almost awards season, which means it’s almost time for our Locus List and Locus Snub sessions. Stay tuned: we’ll be announcing those slates tomorrow in a separate post.