On the Nature of Utopia: A Dialogue Between Ursula K. Le Guin and N. K. Jemisin

The essay discusses Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973) and N.K. Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” (2018), a homage to and a dialogue with Le Guin’s story. Both stories form a compelling dialogue about the nature of utopia, social injustice, violence, and tolerance. As utopia should not provide a blueprint, both societies dismantle the myth that perfection should be a component of utopia: there are privileges, but only for some, and at a high cost, for others. Both rely on the exercise of violence for their sustainability and involve the wronging of a child. In Le Guin, the child’s suffering reveals Omelas’s flawed utopia, a kind of zero-sum game; in Jemisin, the child’s pain is a consequence of choosing to protect utopia. If we read Le Guin’s story as a critique of the principle of scarcity, Omelas is the quintessence of inequality and injustice; if we read Jemisin’s as a reflection on the paradox of tolerance, Um-Helat protects the community from inequality and injustice. I will provide a reading of both stories and their open, ambiguous endings and suggest that they offer a “breaking point” that has the potential to lead readers to “become utopian.” Such precarious endings allow utopian impulse and hope to be maintained within the work, by leaving readers uncomfortable, while asking them to position themselves. Whereas happy endings tend to reassure readers, the function of utopian literature, be it utopia or dystopia, is a sense of unease, of not feeling at home. With their stories and their open endings, Le Guin and Jemisin do not comfort readers, but invite them to choose utopia. Utopia is not a blueprint, but a process, a tension that drives us to change.