@celesteh we saw somebody on Cohost, a while back, put it like this -
that makes it very simple. you know about the child now. will you ignore them, or will you try to do something about it?
N. K. Jemisin wrote something in conversation with that. It certainly gave me a moment.
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-ones-who-stay-and-fight/
It’s the Day of Good Birds in the city of Um-Helat! The Day is a local custom, silly and random as so many local customs can be, and yet beautiful by the same token. It has little to do with birds---a fact about which locals cheerfully laugh, because that, too, is how local customs work. It is a day of fluttering and flight regardless, where pennants of brightly dyed silk plume forth from every window, and delicate drones of copperwire and featherglass---made for this day, and flown on no other!---waft and buzz on the wind.
Like a lot of people, I heard about the Omelas story before I read it, and it really shocked me that there was a big aspect of it which nobody had mentioned to me.
Le Guin uses the repeated phrase "can you imagine that?" during the story not as emphasis, but to interrogate our ability to imagine things. When she describes a blissful society and asks whether we can imagine it, she means that literally: are we able to conceptualise a place that is just nice and everyone likes it, or are we so beaten down by living in a shitty world that our brains cannot imagine anything non-shitty?
Then, when she adds the detail about the tortured child, she asks whether it's now imaginable. Does the fact that an innocent gets tortured make a paradise more believable to us? This struck me almost like a physical blow. It was a way more interesting question than I'd expected, and I really felt called out.
Then, when she talks about those who walk away, she emphasises not that they're better people or worse people, but that they're even less imaginable to us. And that was really uncomfortable.
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