"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin

The first time I heard Le Guin's name was in the movie, "The Jane Austen Book Club."  If you haven't seen it, please do.  It's a lovely little movie and for those of you who don't already know, I'm strangely drawn to all movies starring Emily Blunt.  One weekend I think I unintentionally watched three in a row.  In the movie, the adorable Hugh Dancy plays Grigg, this strange little man who was raised in a home full of women.  He's a big Le Guin fan and described her work with contagious enthusiasm.

I took a stab at "The Left Hand of Darkness" but couldn't make it happen.  I think it was during the time in my life when my son still wasn't sleeping through the night and I had the attention span of a moth.  

I'm pleased to report that Le Guin is one of the few authors in the short story anthology I'm working through that seems to have lived a happy life.  

As I read through the bios in this book the other day, I said to my husband, "All of these people died young, after toiling in obscurity and suffering from severe depression."  He said, "Hemingway didn't toil in obscurity."  When Hemingway is your example of a happy ending, you're in trouble.

Which brings me to Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."  It's a Hugo award winner (big shot science fiction award) and was written in 1975.

The story opens with two very long paragraphs filled with dense prose, but please, if you have the attention span of a moth, keep going.  There's something special here.  The people of Omelas are blessed.  It's a utopian society.  The realist in me was thinking, "You can't write a story about happy people, as proven by Matthew's recent murder on Downton Abbey."  Yes you read right.  He was murdered in cold blood.  Damn you Julian Fellowes!

Don't worry your cynical minds and hearts though, because of course there is a cost for their happiness.  If you are a fan of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" or of "The Hunger Games", you will connect with this story.  It uses the scapegoat device in an unexpected twist that had me struggling to fall asleep last night.  I recommend you read this immediately before happy hour so you can have a cocktail to drown your sorrows.

In the interview that follows the story, Le Guin talks about where she finds inspiration and the origin of the name Omelas.  Apparently, she enjoys reversing the letters in street signs.  Omelas was pulled from a sign she saw that said Salem, Oregon.  I love the lesson there: Find inspiration by turning the mundane upside down.

I've been struggling with whether I should post links to what are probably bootleg websites so that readers can access these stories on their own.  I realized that half of the fun of reading short stories comes from tracking them down on your own, whether through Google, a visit to your local library (my personal favorite), or by actually buying a book.  I'll leave you to it.