#Why Don't We Just Kill The Kid In The Omelas Hole?

[unbossed]

Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim : Clarkesworld Magazine – Science Fiction & Fantasy

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/

Many non-Omelan people said a lot of very mean things (no one outside Omelas had a good and normal relationship with social media), like that the Omelans were monsters for letting the load-bearing suffering child exist and therefore everything about Omelas was fucked beyond belief, and had they known about the load-bearing suffering child, they never would have visited Omelas’ beautiful beaches and nightclubs and festivals, because the knowledge of the child was so goddamn fucking horrific and tainted everything. And maybe it was the Omelans who should be killed.

This sentiment made the Omelans kind of upset. They pointed out that Omelas was a better place to live than most other places because at least you knew the load-bearing suffering child suffered for a reason, as opposed to all the other kids who were suffering for no reason.

[deramin2]

Omelas

"The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas"

By Ursula K. Le Guin 1973

This haunting short story is about a city that can be a utopia only if a single child suffers. You will forever be thinking about this story after reading it.

Fun fact, she chose the name from a passing road sign. Salem O (Oregon) spelled backwards. This story is very much grounded in colonized Oregon's long history of utopia projects (that all eventually fizzle out, many after becoming dangerous cults).

"Why Don't We Just Kill The Kid In The Omelas Hole"

By Isabel J. Kim, 2024

Kim tells the story of what happens if the suffering child of Omelas is killed. Outstanding new story that powerfully examines Omelas vs. our world.

"The Ones Who Stay and Fight"

By N. K. Jemisin, 2018

Jemisin's rebuttal to "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" about a society that achieves utopia through honoring all people as having inherent worth. It asks the reader why that sounds so impossible.

[ellestra]

Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole

Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim

This is a follow up to Ursula leGuin's The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. A story about fabled place, a true utopia where all citizens live a good life except the ones who can't abide the suffering it is built on. Even if that suffering is of an innocent child. And everyone living in Omelas knows it.

The follow up takes it one step further to comment on all of us now. Watching children suffer and nothing changes. The post and protest and talking mean nothing when children keep dying. And yes, this post is also just some words. I will go to work tomorrow as always. And shopping. And no matter how much I support Ukraine and Palestine it certainly feels like it makes no more difference than if I did nothing. But doing nothing is even worse.

[ilikereadingactually]

Omelas double feature!

"The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin and "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim

freeze frame on me, falling down a rabbit hole. you're probably wondering how i got here. *rewind noise* see, two fandoms ago i followed a mutual of a mutual on a different account and now she writes things that i get to read in real life magazines! in fact she wrote a thing that was published in the latest issue of Clarkesworld referencing a short story i have known of by reputation but had never read, and this presented a fun thematic opportunity. and by "fun" i mean i have been turning both these stories over and over in my mind, trying to sort out what i might say about them other than "wow" (affectionate).

so. "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" is, to me, a story about guilt in a hypothetical utopia where almost no one suffers. Le Guin offers, in lush and ringing prose, a place where the abject misery of one child who is locked up, starving and alone, is the stated price for the prosperity and peace of everyone else. the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few here, apparently; the people of Omelas wrestle with this injustice and rationalize until they can accept the terms, and the ones who can't--the ones who walk away--never come back.

i think because it's framed as a hypothetical that lives alongside the reader's reality, an improbable but possible real place, there are a lot of different possible readings. it's just a story, or it's a social commentary, or it's an allegory, or it's already literally happening. it's been on the back burner of my brain for a few weeks, and i'm sure it will continue to simmer there.

AND THEN! Kim fucking sharpens and modernizes all the questions and problems and stakes of this story in her own response, which i read partly aloud to myself because it's beautifully punchy in rhythm. she forces Omelas into closer proximity to the real world we know, invoking social media and moral panic. she pokes at and literalises the terms of Omelas' whole deal, identifying multiple classes of "they" and elaborating random catastrophic consequences of killing the imprisoned child. this story is incisively blunt, raising as many moral and intellectual questions as the original but with new angles and more direct body blows to me, personally, as i go about living in a fucked up world.

so...thanks for all that. i want to print both these stories and paper my walls with them.

the deets

how i read them: as an ebook on Libby and on the Clarkesworld website, respectively! the ebook of "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" has a great introduction and also later reflections by Le Guin which i enjoyed almost as much as the story.

try these if you: are into fiction about moral and social tangles, want to be haunted by ideas, or feel a lot of anger.

some bits i really liked: some good fucking food

from "The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas"

They were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

---

from "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole"

Omelas now has a really long Wikipedia entry, with a whole subarticle about the load-bearing suffering child, and a second subarticle about the children who died. They tell you about the children now, after they die. What their names are. They promise that the children are ethically sourced. But there aren’t any citations. And some people say that there isn’t a kid in the hole anymore. They’ve moved the hole a bunch of times, and they don’t let people know the location anymore. They have extra soundproofing.

[heliological]

omelas writing masterpost

accepting that I will be thinking really hard about omelas approximately once per year for the rest of my life so here's a bunch of links for future me next time I go down this rabbithole

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, Ursula K. Le Guin (1973)

Omelas, Je T’Aime, Kurt Schiller (2022)

The Ones Who Stay and Fight, N.K. Jemisin (2018)

The Ones Who Yell at Omelas, Rite Gud podcast (2022) [links a bunch of other responses]

tumblr post by shedoesnotcomprehend (2018)

After We Walked Away, Erica L. Satifka (2016)

Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole, Isabel J. Kim (2024)

and bc I always forget, the BTS music video that references it is Spring Day

@ myself read another story jfc

[liesmyth]

Books of the month!!!

(for the past 3 months) (forgot to do this for February and March so they're all here)

April

Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel — MORE blorbo Thomas Cromwell! Unreliable narrator tortured evil meow meow goes VROOM!! Genuinely hilarious on top of it. More thots. Fave read of 2024 so far. READ IT.

Dimenticare Berlinguer: La sinistra italiana e la tradizione comunista, Miriam Mafai — Essays on Italian political history. Probably not relevant to tumblr's interests. Very relevant to mine.

Mademoiselle de Maupin, Théophile Gautier — Gender! 1835s epistolary novel with Gender and crossdressing and musings on the value of Beauty! I loved this but it's rambly in a period-typical way. The Italian translation has very witty pretty prose; no idea about the original French, but I've heard the English translation isn't great.

The Angel of Indian Lake, Stephen Graham Jones — Third book of a trilogy. Do rec only if you love Jade Daniels as much as I do. Otherwise, it might get a bit confusing. I DO enthusiastically rec the first book in the trilogy, My Heart Is a Chainsaw, so you will all come to love Jade Daniels as much as I do. You're welcome.

The Manicurist's Daughter, Susan Lieu — A memoir about grief and families and the immigrant experience (Vietnam to west coast US). It's not usually my wheelhouse but I appreciated so many things about it, especially because of the audiobook version. Nonspoilery goodreads review here.

March

Bride, Ali Hazelwood — I don't like werewolf tropes enough to have enjoyed this. Fun romp if you like mates and knots.

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, Philip Gourevitch — Nonfiction; a partial account of the Rwandan genocide. (I say partial bc I think it lacks context if you, like me, don't know much about the topic going in.) Very poignant, unfortunately remains relevant; do NOT go for the audiobook version because it's dull as dirt.

Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel — The book that blorbifies Thomas Cromwell and it's also laugh-out-loud funny. Do yourself a favour and read it.

February

Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronthe — somehow I'd never actually read this in English before? Absolute banger. The first half remains superior.

American Elsewhere, Robert Jackson Bennett — I have screamed about this on tumblr before. COSMIC HORRORS TAKE OVER NEW MEXICO TOWN! Do rec.

Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier — Amazing incredibly showstopping etc.

Clarkesworld, Issue 209 — Love me some cool sff short stories. Standouts: Lonely Ghosts (Meghan Feldman); The Enceladus South Pole Base Named after V.I. Lenin (Zohar Jacobs); Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole (Isabel J Kim)

january books || let's be goodreads friends! here

[bi-hop]

oh hey it's the author of Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole

[morhath]

Mid-Year Book Freak Out

@aroaessidhe tagged me let's gooooo

Number of books you’ve read so far: 139

Best book you’ve read so far in 2024: I've reread two previous five-star reads: There Are No Accidents by Jessie Singer and Translation State by Ann Leckie

Best sequel you’ve read so far in 2024: Most of the sequels I've read this year have been rereads and I don't want this whole post to be rereads. Let's say What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher and We Speak Through the Mountain by Premee Mohamed.

New release you haven’t read yet but want to: Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera (which I have out from the library right now).

Most anticipated release for the second half of the year: Absolution by Jeff Vandermeer (new Southern Reach!), A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher, and The Sky on Fire by Jenn Lyons.

Biggest surprise favorite new author (debut or new to you): Maybe Ryoko Kui? I, like everyone else, got really into Dungeon Meshi earlier this year. I read the whole manga in like three days. I suppose Seth Dickinson counts in a way, since I bounced HARD off the third Baru book and was pleasantly surprised to find that I really liked Exordia. I also enjoyed "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole" and might seek out more work by Isabel J. Kim.

Newest fictional crush: I don't think I have any newer than Miles Vorkosigan, who still dates back a couple years.

Book that made you cry: Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie. (Reread.) Raven Stratagem by Yoon Ha Lee (the servitor who stays behind...) (Reread.) "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole". Exordia. Night Watch by Terry Pratchett. (Reread. For some reason, Reg really got me this time around.)

Most beautiful book you’ve bought so far this year (or received): I'M REALLY TRYING NOT TO BUY BOOKS but The Siege of Burning Grass by Premee Mohamed has a cool cover and I preordered it because I looooove her work.

Book that made you happy: Dungeon Meshi, and just about every single reread, which is too many to list.

What books do you need to read by the end of the year?: Uhhhh there's this one about plane crashes I just bought that I'm really excited for, but overall "need" seems a little strong.

I'll tag @agardenandlibrary @longsightmyth @hypokeimena @falliblefabrial and @a-ramblinrose

[crowns-of-violets-and-roses]

Do you have any good sci-fi recs? I haven't read anything written in the last decade except Murderbot I think.

Oh I have so many. I'll skip the series and books that have been deluged with big American SF awards (although Embassytown, the Teixcalaan duology, The Broken Earth trilogy, and The Locked Tomb series are all more than worth a read to name a few) and list a few other things here that have been published in the last decade or so that I loved.

Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series is amazing. Set in the 25th century where nation states have been replaced by voluntarily joined polities called Hives. The books are framed as a history (the author herself is a historian as a day job) written by an infamous criminal aping the style of the eighteenth century. Lots of fun and a deeply ambitious set of books. They sometimes stumble and fail to realise their ambition but still a great series.

Deep Wheel Orcadia is a verse novel written in the Orcadian dialect of Scots by Harry Josephine Giles. English translations are provided but I found it best read by reading each section in the Orcaidan first and then the English after. Depending on your dialect of English you may often be able to understand a lot of what's happening before moving into the English translation. It follows an artist Astrid returning to her home and an heiress Darling who has run away from her life. They both come to the space station Orcadia and the novel focuses on them and the ordinary people of the station. There's lines of it still lodged in my mind years after reading it.

In Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky a runaway project to terraform a planet and accelerate evolution leads to the inadvertent creation of sentient spiders. It focuses on the development of the spider society, a generation ship of humans and eventually the two of them meeting. A great work of xenofiction. It has two sequels - I've read and enjoyed one and have heard good things about the other - but was originally a standalone and can be read as such.

It wasn't published in the last ten years but Yōko Ogawa's The Memory Police was only translated into English in 2019 so I'm including it here. Set on an island where people periodically forget about different objects and concept and they're removal is then enforced by the titular Memory Police. I'm generally suspicious of literary authors writing SF (I often find it's worse than their usual writing and not good SF) but this book is brilliant and the best I've read by Ogawa.

Isabel J. Kim is one of the best SF short story writers currently writing. While she's best known on tumblr for Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole many of her other stories are better than it. For sci-fi specifically Zeta-Epsilon is a good intro to her work. If you're into SF and fantasy her entire bibliography is worth reading and is nearly all available for free online.

Ted Chiang had a new short story collection Exhalation released in 2019. Chiang is always thought provoking and unlike many SF authors focused on exploring the implications of an idea or concept he knows how to imbue human emotion into his work. The story the collection takes it's title from is available online and is one of my favorites by him if you're looking to get a sense of his work.

Porpentine is best known for her brilliant interactive fiction (IF) . She has a very distinct voice and it should be noted her work is often extremely dark. Usually I'd recommend With Those We Love Alive as an intro to her IF but it's more fantasy than SF, Howling Dogs might be a better entry point if you're into SF specifically and if you're interested in her work she has a collection Eczema Angel Orifice which collects much of her early work. She's also written more experimental work like Foldscape a game made exclusively of folders.

If you aren't into IF Mall school was an early "rare venture into linear storytelling" that I'm fond of. She's written more linear writing in recent years and has released a bunch of short stories, novellas and an amazing novel Serious Weakness (though other than being set five minutes in the future there aren't many SF elements in it).

[measureformeasure]

@lesbiancassius' (very late) february reads

yes I will do this monthly now.

books (as it turns out, I was busy. one book)

Enter Ghost, Isabella Hammad - An actor, Sonia, returns to visit her sister Haneen in Haifa and gets caught up in playing Gertrude in a Hamlet production in the West Bank. Stellar.

short fiction & poetry

Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole, Isabel J. Kim - obsessed with this on title alone. It has such a feel to it in the way it moves that I envy.

Parthenogenesis, Piya Patel - horror that makes me want to peel out of my skin and/or get a hysterectomy.

Eschatology, Eve L. Ewing - poem that was circulating recently and God. Fuck, dude. Yeah. Yeah.

Ouroboros, Megan Xing - The to-do lists in this got me because I was having my little freak out before my show went up where you think you can fix everything with to-do lists. Also heavily feeling replacing ineffective psych meds with yogurt, a pickle, and two advil.

I also read Cancer Buffet by Mary Hannah Terzino and Soft Opening by Elle Nash, but I was tired and don’t remember them.

(some) articles

Who Was Barbie? (A Symposium), n+1 magazine - this cemented to me that I truly, truly do not care about Barbie or the Barbie movie and if I have to hear anything about it ever again I'm smashing a bowl on purpose

A bunch of Hera Lindsay Bird’s advice column, which is delightful.

Let’s talk about Goodreads, Nicole Brinkley. There are many days I am glad I do not want to pursue a career as solely an author of novels. Godspeed to the authors out there you're braver than I will ever be.

Saving a Life, Patricia Lockwood - my god I have got to read a Patricia Lockwood book, and also my god getting grievously ill on vacation is one of my greatest fears so this one made me a little bit crazy.

The Secret Life: On the poet Molly Brodak, Patricia Lockwood - again, my god, I need to read a Patricia Lockwood book.

A Final Checklist Before You Print up Your Play, Rick Roberts - this reminded me so much of Joshua McGuire’s Rules For Writing Libretto, which I think of a lot.

“I think the word is dignity” — Rachel Corrie’s Letters from Gaza — I don’t know what to say. Read these if you can. They’re striking.

The Sexual Status of Aeschylus’ Cassandra, Paula Debnar - I can put an academic paper here you're not the boss of me. why I opened this one I don't remember but I was fervently texting friends in the middle of a certainly unrelated class about it because I've never been normal about Kassandra and Klytemnestra and I'm not going to start now.

tv/movies

Rewatching Severance, slowly.

Rewatching Sort Of, less slowly - this is probably niche to non-Canadian readers but it is a very good show.

Watched The Prince, which was a long time coming, and then wrote a paper about it. Bless.

tbr/nightstand

in the midst of Salvage the Bones, which is of course very good

Helen of Troy: from Homer to Hollywood

I'm gonna be rereading like every play off my Shakespeare class syllabus for the final which I wish I was more excited about

[marvelann]

Why don't we just kill the kid in the Omelas hole

[paperlunamoth]

Isabel J. Kim, "Why Don't We Just Kill The Kid in the Omelas Hole"

[blankticket]

📣 + Freestyle answer!

🎵 // (a very distorted version of) If We Save Just One Child It Will Be All Worth It - Lauren Bousfield

Transcript:

thank you! i think i'll take this opportunity to talk about the "wanted poster arc" that's currently concluding.

it's main inspiration's definitely ursula k. le guin's "[the ones who walk away from] omelas", which is a utopia that thrives on the condition that a lone child suffers an eternal hell; the dilemma of the 'tortured child'.

the concept's compelling to me, as is other derivative work, like isabel j. kim's "why don't we just kill the kid in the omelas hole". for the isolan stamptwins, whose plot's central conflict depends on how these two clash morally, i wanted to express another facet to the dilemma.

what if there was someone who volunteered to be the tortured child?

but, of course, spirale is not omelas; even with there being a tortured child (figuratively. vash is 150+ years old), there clearly is no utopia borne from that. and the tormentor in question is the one who has had utter control over the situation—knives decided to stop, decided to return his brother back to his home. and, of course, those who the (figurative!) tortured child had aimed to make happy are made unhappy all throughout the devil deal

there's quite a bit of background and lead-up going into this, which is easier if you're familiar with at least trigun maximum and easier still if you're familiar with trigun stampede, and what i've been getting up to before this. regardless you can still glean what's inferred to thematically reverberate from the reactions of those involved from the trigun roster.

as with any Big Thing i put stamps through, most of my interest is in the consequences—positive and negative—following what happens.

even though i know it, i don't want to write the objective truth of what happened, for the sake of everyone reading behind the screen; i want to write how it is (specifically) distilled from those involved. that way, i'm encouraging interaction from whatever intrigue that might've been piqued from reading this.

or at least, i hope so! i don't bite…

[goosemixtapes]

max's february 2024 reads

REALLY good reading month! so much good stuff :)

fiction

Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim (↳ can't pitch this one better than the title does.)

the end of A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin (review)

Dare Me by Megan Abbott (review)

Cheer by Megan Abbott (↳ the short story from which Dare Me stemmed! cw for sexual assault)

the first half of Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues

Roger Crenshaw: The Vampires of New Haven (review)

An Unauthorized Fan Treatise by Lauren James (review)

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (reread)

Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin (review)

Paradise Lost book 1 (reread for class)

i also tried to read robert graves' i claudius but you can see how well i did

nonfiction

Plato's Symposium (reread for class)

Computing Machinery and Intelligence by A.M. Turing (↳ the origin of what we call the turing test! and way more fun than i expected)

Gender Criticism Versus Gender Abolition: On Three Recent Books About Gender by Grace Lavery (↳ sort of a book review, sort of a commentary on bioessentialism)

the first third of Unmasking Autism by Devon Price

started Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture by Virginia Sole-Smith

other

a bunch of catullus poems & the isobel williams bdsm translations

the latter four episodes of Dropout's Burrow's End

the first three episodes of the Dare Me TV show

[prozac]

kumie speaking

thinking about isabel j kim's 'why don't we just kill the kid in the omelas hole'

over

[katenepveu]

holy shit: "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole," by Isabel J. Kim. (the title is the content warning)