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deramin2 · 4 months

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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.

#Ursula K. Le Guin #Omelas #The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas #Isabel J. Kim #Why Don't We Just Kill The Kid In The Omelas Hole #N. K. Jemisin #The Ones Who Stay and Fight

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ilikereadingactually · 3 months

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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.

#books and reading #booklr #bookblr #book reviews #book recs #sff short fiction #the ones who walk away from omelas #ursula k le guin #why don't we just kill the kid in the omelas hole #isabel j kim #by the way go listen to the wow if true podcast it's fun

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heliological · 3 months

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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

#le guin #omelas #hmu if you've got other stuff that's interesting #always want to talk about uklg #also I want to see some older interpretations since all of these are from the past 10 years

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liesmyth · 21 days

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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

#book talk #bookblr #book review

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lesbiancassius · 2 months

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@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

#june reads #june.txt #sorry for posting this more than 2/3 through march at 4am. except i'm not <3

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marvelann · 4 months

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

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goosemixtapes · 3 months

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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

#max.txt #readings #this looks like so much. and i guess it is but a lot of it was school-related #and also i am dying egypt dying

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paperlunamoth · 3 months

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

#interesting short read that builds off of the ones who walk away from omelas in a comedic but insightful way #isabel j kim #short story #fiction #the ones who walk away from omelas #luna's

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katenepveu · 4 months

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

#sff #short fiction #mine-ish

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bookgeekgrrl · 3 months

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My media this week (4-10 Feb 2024)

youtube

top 5 personal HO fave - he was he was super thrilled to be there, had a great time, lost his mind a little & flexed (literally). Incredible.

📚 STUFF I READ 📚

😊 Throuple Honey (Brent Archer) - short, sweet & simple with lots of domestic details

🥰 "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole" (Isabel J. Kim) - love a skillful response to the classic original story. I just kept saying 'wow. wow.'

😍😍😍 Reread the entirety of Rachel Reid's Game Changers series. I just love them all SO MUCH!!!! 😍😍😍

Game Changer (Game Changers #1) [Scott & Kip]

Merry Christmas Scott & Kip (Game Changers #1.5)

Heated Rivalry (Game Changers #2) [Shane & Ilya] {here's a really great review of this book, which is THEEEE GREATEST rivals-to-lovers story ever!}

My Dinner with Hayden: A Heated Rivalry Short Story (Game Changers #2.5)

Tough Guy (Game Changers #3) [Ryan & Fabian]

Common Goal (Game Changers #4) [Eric & Kyle]

Role Model (Game Changers #5) [Troy & Harris]

The Long Game (Game Changers #6) [Shane & Ilya, Part 2]

🥰 The Supersoldier's Amnesiac Groom (casspeach) - 48K, very canon divergent arranged marriage AU - reread for Stucky Book Club

📺 STUFF I WATCHED 📺

A Word on Words | NPT: Starter Villain - John Scalzi

Hot Ones - Tony Hawk

Hot Ones - Sterling K. Brown

Hot Ones - Mark Ruffalo

Hot Ones - John Oliver

Hot Ones - Barry Keoghan

Hazbin Hotel - s1, e2

D20: Fantasy High: Junior Year - "Mall Madness" (s21, e5)

D20: Adventuring Party - "Can I Offer You a Nice Shrimp in This Trying Time?" (s16, e5)

🎧 PODCASTS 🎧

Desert Island Discs - Graham Nash, musician

⭐ Up First - The Sunday Story: Tiny Desk, Big Stage

⭐ What Next: TBD - Streaming Is Cable Now

The Atlas Obscura Podcast - Taquile Island

Short Wave - Wolves Are Thriving In The Radioactive Chernobyl Exclusion Zone

The Sporkful - Undercover Dining With NY Times Restaurant Critic Pete Wells

Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang - The Top 10 Places We Would Love To Visit

Pop Culture Happy Hour - 2024 Grammys Recap

Vibe Check - Hey, Sis: featuring Audie Cornish

The Atlas Obscura Podcast - Moynaq

Shedunnit - The Green Penguin

Vibe Check - Hell Has Flooded

⭐ It's Been a Minute - Sam Reich on revamping the game show - and Dropout's success as a small streamer

Ologies with Alie Ward - Theoretical & Creative Ecology (SCIENCE & ECOPOETRY) with Madhur Anand

The Atlas Obscura Podcast - Welcome Home

Short Wave - After 20 Years, This Scientist Uncovered The Physics Behind The Spiral Pass

99% Invisible #569 - Between the Blocks

Switched on Pop - Brittany Howard's Chaos Theory (with Brittany Howard)

⭐ Song Exploder - Green Day "Basket Case"

The Assignment with Audie Cornish - Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce: Cultural Supernova

⭐ Throughline - The Scent of History

⭐ The Atlas Obscura Podcast - Kam Wah Chung & Co. Museum

Alt.Latino - The greatest Boleros of all-time

The Sporkful - Deep Dish With Sohla And Ham: Tacos Al Pastor

Today, Explained - When one (airplane) door opens …

Dear Prudence - Is My Work Husband Keeping Me A Secret From His Wife? Help!

Pop Culture Happy Hour - Lisa Frankenstein And What's Making Us Happy

Endless Thread - Recess Therapy's Julian Shapiro-Barnum is skeptical of kids becoming social media stars

⭐ Strong Songs - "In Your Eyes" by Peter Gabriel

Today, Explained - Why Taylor left TikTok

Short Wave - Clownfish Might Be Counting Their Potential Enemies' Stripes

You're Dead to Me - Simón Bolívar

Consider This from NPR - What Makes A Football Movie Great?

It's Been a Minute - A Super Bowl in 'new Vegas'; plus, the inverted purity of the Stanley Cup

Wait Wait… Don't Tell Me! - Lena Waithe

Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly - Putting the Awe in Audio

🎶 MUSIC 🎶

The Very Best Of Buddy Holly And The Crickets

My Mix #5 [Simon & Garfunkel, Carpenters, John Denver]

Presenting KISS

Presenting Black Sabbath

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iantimony · 3 months

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tuesdaypost evening

if i have to do any more homework i'm for real going to super mario throw myself into the sun

listening: more borodin...some breaking benjamin...FINALLY FINISHED FRIENDS AT THE TABLE PARTIZAN HOLIDAY EPISODES......what a fucking episode dude. i was doing dishes while i listened to that and fully stopped and stood there for like 10 minutes while The Scene with clem and gur sevraq played...the music in that scene.....just wow. incredible. i did not know that jack and keith played different characters for the rest of the season so i'm looking forward to meeting them, first arc after the holiday special is thisbe valence and si so i haven't seen either of them yet...very excited for that though.

reading: Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim - very neat short story. commentary on the way we live these days. ough.

watching: managed to tune into some of the fatt stream tonight haha...very fun...more dunmesh and kill la kill...

playing: i keep forgetting to put ttrpg stuff here. unfortunately it is all dnd at the moment. every other week i do dnd 3 days in a row which might kill me actually! two of them are online, one of which i run, and the one i do in person i'm just a player, so it's like ... not THAT bad ..... this past weekend one of the three got moved so it was just the one i run and the one in-person. the one i run is. well. first of all i'm stealing at least my initial story stuff from mdzs. second of all wow these are some guys of all time. tl;dr, we are talking some romance subplots that are frankly none of my business, god bless 'em, they can go do their love triangle (quadrangle??) in the out-of-game rp channel on the discord, and also there is the biggest tittied bird lady you could possibly imagine.

making: english paper piecing!!! gonna do a border in a solid teal fabric and then do the lining! this is going to be a dice bag probably? :)

oh! and pottery from last week! technically these came out of the kiln before the new year but i didn't get back to the studio til last wednesday.

first: what i'm affectionately calling my Mold Bowl because it looks like. this.

then eye bowl number one, which needs to go back in the kiln actually because a little bit of ? kiln medium ??? got flung into it and it's not smooth so i need to dremel it down and re-glaze the little spot

and finally, eye bowl number two, more of a cup really! i really really love how the inside glaze came out. i'm gonna make a little set of teacups like this but with all that glaze.

eating: roommate made a braised eggplant, pork, and mushroom thing that i've been eating for like three days. sooo good. i also got some chocolates from a local candy shop, including hot pepper dark chocolate stars (they are quite spicy!) and 'chocolate covered honeycomb candy' which i never had before but am now obsessed with. the texture...

misc: the amount of busy work i have to do this semester to finish the masters degree requirements? terrible. agony. i miss free time.

#tuesdayposting

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iamanathemadevice · 4 months

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https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/

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

by Isabel J. Kim

So they broke into the hole in the ground, and they killed the kid, and all the lights went out in Omelas: click, click, click. And the pipes burst and there was a sewage leak and the newscasters said there was a typhoon on the way, so they (a different “they,” these were the “they” in charge, the “they” who lived in the nice houses in Omelas [okay, every house in Omelas was a nice house, but these were Nice Houses]) got another kid and put it in the hole.

3190 words, short story. Fucking brutal.

If you haven't read the story this references, "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" by Ursula K LeGuin, the pdf is here.

#the ones who walk away from omelas #Isabel J Kim

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gunkreads · 3 months

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I read Isabel J. Kim's recent Clarkesworld short story, Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole, this morning, and my initial reaction was basically :/ but as the day has gone on and it's marinated, I'm Seeing the Thesis, I think. The flippant, matter-of-fact voice was a little disarming in a way that perfectly mirrored LeGuin's original tone, but felt even more casual to me because it's closer to the patterns of oral speaking and storytelling I've grown up with. Really interesting expansion on the idea that seems to keep having layers of meaning beneath the ones I've uncovered.

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gallium-spoon · 3 months

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Time for the February book report!

Books I finished this month:

City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith (I read the last 300 pages) (nonfiction)

Books I read completely this month:

Why don't we just kill the kid in the Omelas hole? By Isabel J Kim (10 pages)

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan (315 pages)

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan (230 pages)

Books I started this month:

The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons by Sam Kean (I'm 75 pages in) (nonfiction)

I read a total of 930 pages this month!

(I am still reading Rhythm of War, I just put it on hold this month)

#monthly reading report #monthly book report #books #reading

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zell2036 · 4 months

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why don't we just kill the kid in the omelas hole?

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/

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