This fanfic about Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" is great. One of the comments asks the author to do "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" next.
This got me thinking, not so much about fiction that responds to the original Le Guin story (there are endless stories that respond to the Le Guin story) as the conservative response to that story.
About ten years ago, during the Puppy Wars, conservative SF writers and readers got very upset about the Le Guin story. Partly this is due by their inability to understand the story, I think, which is not meant to be read literally -- that is, Le Guin does not want you to suspend your disbelief and think there is an actual Utopian city which depends on keep an actual child locked up in misery in an actual basement broom closet, and then decide what you should do about that. It's a metaphor, a way of thinking.
(What's the story mean then? Well, like any good metaphor, it is over-determined. It means many things: that we can't image a Utopian space; that stories can't be about Utopia because we have been taught by our culture that happiness is boring; that every single healthy child in our current world is predicated on the suffering of children in other places; that our happiness depends on the suffering and the exploitation of other living beings; and that most of us learn to live with that.)
In the story, most people in Omelas come to accept the necessity of keeping a single child in misery. Their beautiful city and their beautiful lives and their beautiful happy children depend on it, and it is not, after all, such a high price to pay -- one suffering child, who isn't even their child.
A few people, though, walk away from the Utopia, refusing to accept that price. Le Guin admits (this is the line that saves the story) that she doesn't know where they are going:
The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist.
Conservatives are not furious about what the metaphor in the story implies.
No, they're furious that the adolescent kids in the story walk away from the city.
The most common response I saw from the Puppies was that if they were in Omelas they would take their guns and slaughter everyone in their path, mounting a rescue of that child. That's what they would do in Omelas. No child suffering on their watch!
(Yes, these are the same Conservatives that approve of child labor which gives them cheap teeshirts and are fine with the situation in Gaza and love the idea of stealing children from immigrants and minorities so that good white Christian parents can raise those children in the Lord and accept homeless children and impoverished children as the price of a capitalist society and are just fine with factory farming and global climate destruction which is wiping out untold species and causing the suffering of millions, and do I need to go on?)
As I saw once on a Buddhist blog, "Everyone wants to save the world but no one wants to help Mom do the dishes."
Which is to say, if you want to rescue that child, no one is stopping you. But you're going to have to walk away from Omelas. You're going to have to, somehow, find a new way to structure the world. Like Le Guin, I don't know how you do that.
I know you won't do it by shooting people, though.
