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Miss_Speller t1_j3z4k1s wrote

Reply to comment by Gardah229 in "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Leguin affected me like few books have done by feanor_imc

It's possible that you could be mixing it up with her story The Day Before the Revolution that describes Odo, the woman who started the anarchist revolution at the heart of The Dispossessed. In her introduction to the story in The Wind's Twelve Quarters, LeGuin describes Odo as "one of the ones who walked away from Omelas." (Though she clearly means that in a very figurative sense; it's not at all set in the same world as Omelas.)

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Gardah229 t1_j3z7ngh wrote

That's certainly ringing some bells, so I think you're bang on. I've only read The Direction of The Road, and Omelas, so my wider LeGuin knowledge is pretty thin. Must have over-egged the connection in my head. I'll have to give that a read all the same now it's got my attention.

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Miss_Speller t1_j3z92fo wrote

It's a lovely story; it and Omelas bring a tear to my eye each time I read them. It would be best to read it after reading Dispossessed so you know just who Odo is and what a change she made in her world, but it's a treasure on its own.

Edit: I'm re-reading it now, and this jumped out at me as relevant to the theme of Omelas:

>There would not be slums like this, if the Revolution prevailed. But there would be misery. There would always be misery, waste, cruelty. She had never pretended to be changing the human condition, to be Mama taking tragedy away from the children so they won't hurt themselves. Anything but. So long as people were free to choose, if they chose to drink flybane and live in sewers, it was their business. Just so long as it wasn't the business of Business, the source of profit and the means of power for other people.

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