Ursula Le Guin (browse this site for more info on the author) may be known to some of you for her quality canon of science fiction and fantasy writing.  If not yet, then she is an author worth pursuing.  Her particular talents are showcased here in the short story, "The Ones Who Walk away from Omelas."

She sets out detailing the utopian city of Omelas.  From the very beginning she is aware of the likely resistance that the reader has towards the notion of Utopia.  Popular wisdom tells us that societies are hardly engineerable enough to perfect as it is.  Add to that problem, the difficulty of making any two people value the same things, and what may be heaven to you may be hell to someone else.

LeGuin gets around the logistical problems of Utopia by leaving much of it blank.  Aspects of it are either left blank or malleable so that we can fill in the factors that make up our own paradise.

But beyond all things Le Guin is a realist.  She anticipates our doubt.  How could this place exist?  It could not be real -- it´s too perfect?  Well, there´s a catch, Le Guin tells us, and as catches go, it´s a good one.

The beauty and the prosperity and the culture of this perfect place hinges in some undefined way on a price that has to be paid.  Like "The Lottery," the story works on a scapegoat principle.  Someone pays the price for the greater good. 

The price is simple.  In a closet, kept close and quiet, maltreated and systematically abused, is a young child.  The child might have had an opportunity for a full life if it had not been selected for this special role.  As it is, the child is reduced to idiocy.  It stews in its own foeces, mewling and whimpering like an animal.

But that´s not the worst of it.  The child is a celebrity of sorts.  Far from being a secret facet of Omelas, the way child abuse is in our society, the child is visited by every citizen at some point in their lives.  Everyone knows that it is there.  They go, periodically, to face the shameful suffering which is the foundation of their perfectly happy lives and many of them go home weeping.  But they go home.

More significantly, some of them don´t go home at all.  They determine that the price of happiness is too steep and walk away from Omelas, away from paradise; and having walked away they never look back.

Like most of Le Guin´s work, we are the subject, though the setting is alien or fantastic.  The Utopian society is a distorted reflection of our own.  The child in the closet is a symbolic echo of the kinds of compromises we make every day to preserve the comfort zone of life in an industrial nation.

Who is the child in our closet?  Or do you think we´re too civilized to have one?Who are the people who walk away from Omelas?

Should we read the story as an understated, gratuitous fantasy or as a means of shaping the world for us, so that we come to a better understanding of who we are, and what we do?  Here are words of advice from Ursula Le Guin to a "young writer."

Click here for a youtube commentary on the story.  How about filming your own?