To wit: Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series is not evocative of “Those Who Walk Away From Omelas.” It is a rejection (whether intended or not) of Le Guin’s malignant thesis that the only options when confronting evil is to either just live with it, or else flee from its power*. There’s always the choice to fight back.
Okay, I’ll get off this soapbox now.
Continue reading A point of order on Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series.John comes close to enlightenment here wit “Omelas State University” – so heartbreakingly close – but in the end he accepts Ursula K Le Guin’s brilliantly malignant and endlessly corrupting false choice when it comes to The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas: when confronted with evil as the bargain for perfection, the answer is neither to accept the bargain, nor walk away from the bargain.
The answer is to SMITE THE EVIL.
It’s sad: I expected just a shade better from John Scalzi. Just a shade.
Moe Lane
Looking over Salon’s Kate Harding’s possibly too-surprised realization that too many people that she’s presumably normally OK with seem willing to forgive a child-rapist who makes good movies (via Little Miss Attila); The Guardian’s account of the way that Hollywood is forming up to defend said child-rapist (who, by the way, confessed to the crime) (via Big Hollywood); and Patterico’s observation that Anne Applebaum didn’t even read the stories that she linked to while defending the child-rapist (that would be the one who used drugs to rape a 13 year old girl) (via Instapundit)… yeah. Roman Polanski would have been a perfect fit for Omelas.
And they would have loved to have him, too.
Moe Lane
Crossposted to RedState.
…shown here by Joyce Carol Oates and Melissa Lafsky. It’s perfectly natural for a class of people who generally tend to include a short story like The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas* in their lists of ‘good’ science fiction.
Which is another way of saying that I’m not surprised that those two authors are being partisan in weighing the balance between justice for an innocent, and pushing an ideological agenda. I just wish that they’d stop pretending that they can reconcile doing it and being feminists, in any meaningful sense of the term.
Moe Lane
Continue reading I’m not really surprised at the acceptance of blood sacrifice…
