The New York Review of Science Fiction Issue #300, August 2013 by Kevin J. Maroney & the editors

Author:Kevin J. Maroney & the editors
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Burrowing Wombat Press
Published: 2013-08-24T04:00:00+00:00

The Last Men shall be first? No, sir. You are on your own, big heads.

Le Guin, however, does agonize and makes others agonize (cf. those upset students), for which we give thanks and from which she gives this two-volume selection of her favorite short stories. She takes us along 38 steps outside of The World That Is and into 38 other realms, organized into two books whose titles give a vague impression of how to distinguish their story contents—magic realism to the left, sf/f to the right. Though she does love us best, since the second volume gets twenty tales, to eighteen for the first. (Don’t tell her or the New Yorker that I said that.) In either case, what she demonstrates is the Power of Story, however constituted, built from both the Unreal and the Real and not depending on either to achieve the True. To discourse a bit further on that admixing and its admonishing, divulgent result, I must retrace my steps to Omelas.

Omelas is a very ambiguous utopia, more so than even Anarres, the anarchist planet of The Dispossessed. It is the epicenter of that hideous bargain that James felt no one with moral impulses would ever accept. Except Le Guin shows us how we just might. The cityscape of Omelas is filled with all the accouterments of a perfected urban environment, with handsome train station and magnificent Farmers’ Market and street performers and the Festival of Summer and just enough illicit fun (“the faint insistent sweetness of drooz”) to add spice to the hearty, filling porridge. And one more thing, to make it believable, as Le Guin puts it: the child (thin, abused, unsexed “it”) who dwells in the locked basement room, to whom “there may not even be a kind word spoken” (2: 6). And no secret, this. Every resident of Omelas must be told, some even go to see. But the terms are absolute: happiness for thousands, misery for one. And most can accept. In fact, they find that acceptance ennobling: “They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion” (2:7). All their art, their science, their achievement, their leisure is tinged with that poignant, nigh-heroic burden.

In other words, “This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.” Funny how the strap never comes down on the ass of the strap-wielder, though. For those who cannot whip the child, the answer is to walk away from Omelas, heading for “a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. . . . But they seem to know where they are going” (2: 7).

So, what is Omelas? It is not an autarchy nor a tyranny of the one or the few. There is no central government described, no hierarchy, no administration. There is not even an organization that maintains the misery of the child, whose dungeon is “under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes” (2: 5).

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