An Omodest Proposal

new fiction on Omelas and empire

Esteemed neighbors, emissaries, ambassadors, and dignitaries, I write to you today not only as a statesman but as a scientist.

We in the city of Omelas have been exceedingly lucky in recent years. The wars, diseases, and financial instability that have rocked the world have so far passed us by. Partly that’s been due to prudent precautions and smart public investments, but it’s also true that our fine city benefits in unique ways from ancient, dearly-held customs.

This is the opening to my new flash fiction story, out today in Lightspeed Magazine: “An Omodest Proposal.” It’s quite short, and I’m quite proud of it, so please give it a read. You can also listen to it on the Lightspeed podcast.

This story is my contribution to a minor SFF tradition: the Omelas response story. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is a classic 1973 story by Ursula K. LeGuin — in my opinion the greatest SFF writer of all time. LeGuin’s story describes a utopian city in vivid and thoughtful detail, and then reveals that, according to its inhabitants, this utopia’s wellbeing rests on the continuous suffering of a single, innocent child.

It’s a thought experiment of immense ambiguity. Is this apparent moral compromise acceptable? If not, what should one do about it? LeGuin leaves such questions as an exercise to the reader, and exercise they do. Over the last half century, “Omelas” has provoked many classroom discussions and essays and social media jokes.

It has also provoked other stories. Something about this story just makes writers want to parody or pay homage or otherwise riff on LeGuin’s core conceit. There’s N.K. Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” about trying to fix injustice instead of simply walking away. There’s P.H. Lee’s “A House by the Sea” imagining the adult lives of the suffering children. There’s John Holbo’s take on Omelan tourism. There’s Isabel J. Kim’s excellent story from a year ago, “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole." My friend LP Kindred had a story in which the kid was instead a captive god, who is rescued by his lover. There was that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode that borrowed the Omelan conceit. Heck, I’m told there’s even a BTS video.

I myself have written a bit about Omelas on this newsletter before, coining the idea of “Omelian thinking” — the tendency to assume that better worlds or utopian futures must be the result of some horrible moral bargain.

And now I’m back with my own response story, “An Omodest Proposal” — the title of course a reference to both “Omelas” and Jonathan Swift’s famous satire “A Modest Proposal.” In this piece I don’t try to countermand LeGuin’s thought experiment (though I do, if the narrator is to be believed, settle one aspect of the ambiguity). Instead, I extend the scope. What would you do if Omelas offered to annex your town, fix all your society’s problems, give everyone a utopian lifestyle of peace and joy? How does expansion change the utilitarian calculus? Is utopia still utopia if it’s not an exception but the rule, if it’s everywhere, if it’s an empire?

Like all good Omelas stories, it’s a little bit wistful and a little bit mean. I hope folks find it a worthy addition to the genre.

It feels odd to write about utopias when in reality we are careening at top speed in the opposite direction. The evil in Omelas (if indeed you think there is one) is a subtle one: an evil of compromise, of ‘greater good,’ and also of apathy and cowardice. An evil of turning away. The evil now trying to tear apart the fabric of American society is not subtle at all. It’s brutish and noisy and brazen. The worst, most hateful and selfish and stupid people in the country are presently performing an oligarchic coup. They are doing away with the inconvenience of American democracy in order to put uppity workers and women and minorities back in their place. They told us they were going to do this, and people elected them anyway, but it’s still a coup. Very likely we are in just the first moments of a long reactionary rampage. We’re so, so far from utopia this week.

Still I do think there’s a parallel to be drawn. My story attempts to trace the way that, left unchecked, small evils get ambitious. If you normalize them, they will keep taking an inch, and then a yard, and then a mile. They’ll turn imperial. That’s what happened in America. Whether due to fascination or exhaustion or ignorance or indifference, we let the forces of fascism and reaction carve themselves a place in our polity. We turned away or walked away or just went on with our lives. We let this nasty little darkness fester. We let them get away with it. And now we’re reaping the consequences.

So if you see cops or border patrol or fashy-looking guys hauling some kid through the streets, toward a basement, or an ICE bus, or detention camp — don’t walk away. Don’t believe them when they say they’re doing this for your benefit, for the greater good, for 'common sense.’ Because pretty soon they’d like to haul off your neighbor, or your coworker, or you. It won’t just be the one kid.

Recommendations + Fellow Travelers

• To celebrate the recent publication of Solarpunk: Short Stories from Many Futures (in which I have a story reprinted), Flame Tree Publishing is running a solarpunk art competition. The contest page includes definitions of solarpunk from many of the anthology contributors, including myself. Very cool to to see all these ways of conceiving of solarpunk gathered in one place. Check it out.

• The Imagine 2200 Climate Fiction Contest has released its fourth volume of stories, each one with really beautiful art. These are consistently some of the most interesting and thoughtful solarpunk-adjacent stories gathered in one place. Give them a read.

• Fellow ASU author and very nice fellow Hayden Casey has a two book year ahead. First, his short story collection Show Me Where the Hurt Is comes out from Split/Lip Press in April. Then his debut novel A Harvest of Furies comes out from Lanterfish Press in the fall. Give his collect a preorder, and give Hayden a follow.

• Sci-fi friend and collaborator Corey Jae White has a recent story out in Strange Horizons, co-written with fellow Melbourne author Maddison Stoff. The story, “Crisis Actors,” was one of five winners of the Stop Copaganda short story contest. Give it a read.

• WTFutures has put out a call for past, ongoing, and upcoming projects involving youth exploring climate futures. The project team includes my friend Daniel Kaplan, of Plurality University. If you work at the intersection of youth, futures, and climate, check out the open call.

• Finally, I want to remember Nicolas Nova, a design scholar and futures thinker from Geneva who passed away suddenly at the very end of 2024. I had the pleasure to hang out with Nicolas last summer at a conference in Montreal, after knowing each other from the Near Future Lab Discord. He was an incredibly sharp and big-hearted guy, the only sensible person on his AI panel, and great fun to get dinner and drinks with. Here are a couple other tributes put out by folks who knew him better. He’ll be missed.

Art Tour: Interior of St. Peters’s, Rome

The above image is a 1731 painting by Giovanni Paolo Panini, which I saw on display at the St. Louis Art Museum last summer.

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