Olly! (olympia for long :p)

a sequel to The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas that's the travel journal of a guy who walked away from Omelas as he discovers all these exciting new trolley-problem societies beyond the mountain

Day 1. I've officially left my home. It feels like tearing out my organs to do so, but now that I've seen that tiny cancerous root of suffering, I know I cannot stay. There must be a better world out there. There must be a place where happiness is more than a zero-sum game -- or else this world is for naught.

Day 10. I've made it through the mountains (barely, only barely) and have reached the city of Amohal. The skies are gray, the buildings are gray, the people are gray. My tour guide, a flat-voiced woman in a flat-voiced tunic, tells me of the rule of balance: whenever one person in Amohal suffers, another rejoices just as much. If you stub your toe, your neighbor may find a lucky penny; if you discover true love, it's the result of someone -- maybe someone you know, maybe someone you don't -- losing it. All things remain in balance: loss is always happy, and gain is always sad. You cannot control happiness entering your life, but the moral thing is to never seek it out, lest it come at the misfortune of another. Perhaps I'll stay here a few days, taking on some pain in the penance mines; there's a child's birthday coming up tomorrow, and we want to make sure it's a good one.

Day 15: I will leave Amohal soon. Suffering for others felt noble until yesterday, when I remembered a rosy-fond memory of Omelas and let out a smile. A man on the other side of the road dropped a bag of groceries, and the wince of eggs cracking reminded me of my stoic duty.

Day 19. Having departed Amohal, I've followed a grief-caravan to the city of Evlag, a religious place where the truest god is sorrow. The idea is that fleet-and-fickle happiness cannot be trusted, but even the simplest sadness is pure and undeniable. There are minor gods of disgust, fear, rage, but Sorrow is the faith around which all congregate. Mothers weep for their children's eventual deaths, newlyweds weep for their inevitable parting, and the bereaved savor their all-consuming grief. Happiness is childish, so only children are happy (and adults, when they think no one is looking.) This is not the place for me.

Day 23. I've come across a new city where everyone's always just a little bit sad, except every day there's a randomly-chosen person who gets to be extremely happy for 24 hours. The happy man of the day is currently running around naked, screaming in glee, as glum onlookers quietly wish to join him. I'm not sure this is better?

Day 85: The traveling town of Livran is entirely on rails. Unfortunately, just as I arrived, the brakes failed. It is currently hurtling towards a fork in its path where

is that most of them are very annoying because the original omelas story only barely suggests omelas is a real place. a huge chunk of it is spent interrogating what it would take to believe omelas is a real place. le guin spends graf after graf being like "there is as much sex or drug use or whatever in omelas as you, my reader, personally desire" because she's setting up the question of what it would take to convince the reader of the possibility of this utopia. the line that sets up the kid comes after the narrator describing the best festival ever and goes

Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.

i'm not suggesting omelas-the-story is totally unconcerned with what you do with or in omelas-the-place, because then it wouldn't end the way it does, but i think it goes understated that a big chunk of the story is the question whether the omelas that works without the kid is something you're willing to imagine at all.

i think isabel kim's "why don't we just kill the kid in the omelas hole" dodges most of this by playing with the abstract idea of omelas, rather than the omelas as presented in le guin's story. (literally it opens with the idea of omelas having capital-NH "Nice Houses," which strikes me as a much more concrete statement than le guin ever made about the place.) kim is writing as much about how people think about omelas, and to some degree about how "we" (modern people, & implicitly usamericans in particular) think about atrocities writ large, which makes her piece more interesting.

but almost every other omelas response i've ever seen is trying to solve omelas like it's a puzzle, as if there's a perfect solution. but it's like writing fiction about the person who's going to solve the trolley problem by knowing the secrets of how trains work, or rails, or being able to throw a knife really good so you can cut the ropes on the one person and they can run away. if you want to reject the premise of a hypothetical scenario, or even if you don't find it interesting, then great (i've never found the trolley problem to be tremendously interesting myself.) but like—don't mistake that for solving it.

Sorry boss, I need to leave early today. I'm busy trying to remember if kangaskhan is a pokemon or a real animal. Yeah I know it clearly is a play on Genghis Khan and Kangaroo. That doesn't really mean anything. Catfish is a mix of Catherine the Great and Fish. No, looking it up seems like cheating

Sorry boss, I need to leave early today. I'm busy trying to remember if kangaskhan is a pokemon or a real animal. Yeah I know it clearly is a play on Genghis Khan and Kangaroo. That doesn't really mean anything. Catfish is a mix of Catherine the Great and Fish. No, looking it up seems like cheating