Episode: 103 – [Review] The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

We’re diving into Ursula K. Le Guin for the first time on Paperback Friends with The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. It may be one of the shortest stories we’ve covered, but there’s an awful lot packed into those few thousand words.Le Guin’s writing is secondary to the question she builds the story around. Omelas is a perfect utopia, but its happiness depends entirely on the suffering of one child. What makes the story so clever is how quietly Le Guin turns that premise back on the reader, forcing us to consider our own complicity in the comfortable societies we live in.Type: Review | Book: The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas | Writer: Ursula K. Le Guin