I'm sitting here killing time before uploading my latest book, "Slave Margaret." It's the third book in my "Slave Girl at the End of the World" trilogy.
Why am I killing time? Officially I'm waiting until after lunch. But in reality, I'm just feeling dilatory. Whatever, "Slave Margaret" will be available for pre-order early next week and will launch on Feb. 7.
But I've been thinking about a classic short story that deals with some of the same issues as my trilogy.
It is "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," by renowned science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin.

Omelas is a beautiful utopia, but its beauty and prosperity are dependent on the suffering of a single child. The title refers to Omelas citizens who, having seen the child's misery, can't bear the guilt of living such a comfortable life knowing that, by doing so, they participate in the evil inflicted on a child.

In my "Slave Girl" series, things aren't so clear cut. A plague has killed most of the people in the world, including nearly all of the men. In order to simply survive, such legal system as still exists, conscripts women to do the hard demanding work. IOW, they institute slavery. And, in order to accentuate the difference between slaves and free people, they remove legal personhood from slaves and require slaves to be kept nude and in chains. (After all, this is an erotic novel.)
Our heroine, Denise, is sentenced to die. But, at the last second, she is bought by a Florida farmer, Terry McNally, to serve him as a sex slave. He has other slaves who work his fields. He keeps them in a prison compound outside, and ensures that they are worked relentlessly.
Denise, though, is kept in the house to serve her master's sexual needs as well as do housework.
Terry is ambivalent about slavery. He can't "walk away," though. He is responsible for producing food for the surviving 2000 people in the nearby town.
Denise, though, has benefitted from slavery. She was enslaved and not executed. Unlike the field slaves, she lives in a comfortable house, eats good food, and - best of all - she has a sex life with one of the few remaining men. Even the most prosperous of the free women don't have that. So, she is not a hard-core abolitionist.
Life isn't as simple as Le Guin suggests. It isn't that any system has a comfortable population based on the oppression of the few.
Did you know that - although slavery was abolished in the US in 1865, child labor was legal until 1938? And what were these kids but slaves? In "Capital," Karl Marx writes movingly about the children laboring in British mills and factories and shows how they enabled bourgeois prosperity.
But, he doesn't consider the alternative. What would happen to the excess children of Scottish farmers if they couldn't go to London and Birmingham and Manchester to work in the mills?
Today, our cellphones and notebooks rely on the slave labor of Congolese children. Many African kids who are forced to pick cacao will never taste chocolate. Our smartphones and computers are assembled by people who live in dorms on factory grounds, and work in buildings which have nets under the windows to keep them from jumping to their deaths.
But remember, people move from the countryside to get these "jobs."
My novels don't discuss these issues. But the transition from modernity to a slave society is not that big a leap. And, unlike Le Guin's child suffering in a cellar, the system works for everyone...for some more than others.
Anyway: Read my book. Enjoy the hot sex scenes and the adventures of my characters. But also check out Le Guin's short story. My work is pure entertainment. "Omelas" examines the issues behind it.