Why Don't We Just Kill The Kid in the Omelas Hole

by Isabel J. Kim

Genres: Short Stories, Science Fiction, Fiction, Fantasy, Philosophy, Dystopia, Speculative Fiction

10 pages, ebook

First published February 1, 2024

About the author

Isabel J. Kim lives near New York City in an apartment filled with books and swords. She is the author of numerous short stories and has won the Nebula, Locus, BSFA and the Shirley Jackson Awards. Her work has been translated into multiple languages and reprinted in multiple best of the year anthologies. When she’s not writing, she’s practicing law or podcasting. Find her at isabel.kim or @isabel.kim on Bluesky.

Reviews

[Hirondelle (not getting notifications) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Isabel J. Kim is actually a writer capable of a lot of subtlety in storytelling, with a really wide range of styles and themes (and hopefully story lengths). You would not know that necessarily for this, the most atypical work of hers (but she does have range), a kind of long rant, with many parenthesis, a reply to a classic sf philosophical short story. Full of insight but detached (, full of social commentary relevant to right now. The most atypical story of hers, the one showing less of her other skills (though the understanding of how humans tick is here front and center) and it's by far the most popular work of hers, and the one that is ending, finally, on award lists. Ironic that, but hey this is an ironic story.

I read it when it came out in Clarkesworld February 2024 but it is a Hugo finalist this year and I wanted to reread it to better judge it. This is probably my least favorite short story, the most limited, by she is an author I really really like and who is an auto-read for me, and it is still very worth it. Not sure if this was a week year for some categories (I mean, look at the novellas! Even the novels everybody wrote better things in better years, and I am ignoring the two newbies on purpose), but this story is the most interesting to me, the most powerful story on its category. But if you like sf/f short stories go look for everything else she has written and do not think her style is represented by this.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the second short story I have read that purports to be a sequel/homage to Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (which I briefly review here), the first being N. K. Jemisin’s The Ones Who Stay and Fight. This is my first Isabel Kim work—it came up in a discussion featuring Omelas vis-à-vis current human rights atrocities in a certain occupied territory in the Middle East—so I can’t say whether it’s a literary high or low for her, but I personally find it better than Jemisin’s homage but not quite up to the greatness of Le Guin’s original, which my star ratings for the three short stories reflect.

Part of why I feel both successor stories fail to meet or surpass Le Guin’s original is that they use very modern-sounding language and references (technological, ideological, and historical) that take away from the timeless feeling of the original. But I think my bigger beef is that both Kim and Jemisin—Kim to a lesser extent—seem to miss the point of the titular Ones Who Walk Away in the original, both on the metaphorical and (as much as an allegorical short story can have one) literal level.

On the literal level, walking away from Omelas is not a selfish abdication of responsibility towards the foresaken child upon which the utopia depends; walking away from Omelas involves going to the “place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness” that may not even exist. To understand this, one must now look at Omelas beyond the surface-level critique of utilitarianism, and instead at its critique of “the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain” and its converse sin of eschewing happiness as tedious naïveté, an unwillingness to conceive of a true utopia. Both Jemisin and Kim do not thoroughly engage with this layer in my opinion.

But perhaps you may find yourself disagreeing; you can decide for yourself by reading Why Don't We Just Kill The Kid in the Omelas Hole for free and legally on the Clarkesworld magazine’s website as part of (with <20 minutes to spare) this month’s issue.

[Abolfazl Nasri · Rating 4 out of 5]

دهمین داستان از مجموعه داستان کوتاه بی‌کران:
بازنویسی ایزابل کیم از «املاس» تجربه متفاوتی بود. همون اول حس می‌کنی نویسنده با جسارت وارد دنیای لو گویین شده و همه‌چیز رو می‌بره وسط فضای امروز؛ از رسانه و شبکه‌های اجتماعی گرفته تا سیاست و شعارهای روز. این ایده که هر بار بچه‌ی توی دخمه کشته می‌شه و شهر دوباره باید با پیامدهاش دست و پنجه نرم کنه، به‌شدت به دنیای معاصر شبیهه؛ دنیایی که همه‌چیزش جلوی چشم مردمه، روی صفحه‌ها و در اخبار. همین باعث می‌شه روایتش یک‌جور ضرب‌آهنگ سریع و رسانه‌ای داشته باشه که گیرایی خاص خودش رو داره.
ولی راستش رو بخوای، برای من کمی زیادی مستقیم بود. جایی که لو گویین با ایهام، سکوت و تصویرسازی آدم رو تا مغز استخوان تکان می‌ده، اینجا کیم میاد و خیلی روشن و با صدای بلند حرفشو می‌زنه. انگار می‌خواد مطمئن بشه هیچ‌کس پیام رو از دست نمی‌ده. همین باعث می‌شه داستان گاهی شعارزده به نظر بیاد و از اون هاله‌ی رازآلود و عمق فلسفی کار اصلی فاصله بگیره. به‌خصوص وقتی پای مقایسه میاد وسط، حس می‌کنی اون ظرافت و تعلیق اخلاقی که توی متن لو گویین وجود داشت، اینجا با صراحت و شلوغی عوض شده.
با همه‌ی این‌ها، نمی‌شه انکار کرد که کار خلاق و به‌روزیه. جسارتش ستودنیه، مخصوصاً توی دنیایی که همه به‌نوعی دارن با همون «کودک توی دخمه» خودشون کنار میان. برای من ارزش خوندن داشت، ولی اگر بخوام مقایسه کنم، قطعاً به پای کار اصلی نمی‌رسه. برای همین چهار ستاره می‌دم: خوب، تأثیرگذار، اما نه در حد یک شاهکار جاودانه.

[Nea Poulain · Rating 1 out of 5]

no es peor que the ones who stay and fight pero no es mejor.

nadie entiende que quiere decir ursula con irse. como sus textos se mueren de literalidad, creen que le guin también se moría de literalidad y la única manera en que se puede interpretar la idea de marcharse de omelas es quien se va fisicamente, no la transformación de la que está hablando le guin.

suelten omelas y escriban sus historias. les irá mejor. así no nos daremos cuenta de que no saben leer.

[wasteland baby · Rating 4 out of 5]

for my fellow omelas-heads - available to read here: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_...

[Brok3n · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too much like reading the news

Omelas is a very famous short story by the very famous science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin. For the record, I think that both Le Guin and Omelas deserve their fame. Omelas is the name of a Utopian city. The first half of the text describes Omelas in all its glory. We then learn that there is a cost to this Utopian happiness. In Omelas there is a child who lives in constant unremitting suffering.

The kicker is in the final two paragraphs

At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or a woman much older falls silent for a day or two, then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman.

Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

It is heavy-handed, but Le Guin often was like that.

The rebellion of the Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is limited to that, to walking away.

Of course, it is not meant to be plausible in any literal sense. We are, however, invited to understand that each of us lives and is happy (if we are) at the expense of the suffering of other people, and that we look away. And that even the quietest form of rebellion is yet rebellion.

Isabel J. Kim's Why Don't We Just Kill The Kid in the Omelas Hole is a finalist for the 2025 Best Short Story Hugo. It imagines an Omelas in which rebellion takes more active form. It is far more plausible than Le Guin's original story, in the sense that you can imagine, if Omelas were somehow real, that people would fight in these ways. In fact, it is too plausible. To me, reading Why Don't We Just Kill The Kid in the Omelas Hole felt like reading the news as I do every day.

It felt like a version of "Omelas" written by someone who had missed the point of the original story. I don't believe that's what it is. I am sure that Kim fully understands Le Guin, and chooses for her own reasons to deliberately place a bomb under it and blow it to the skies. Her purpose in doing this, alas, escaped me.

Blog review.

[emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one is for the "fascism can't happen here" crowd. For those who don't want to talk about land-back or reparations. This is like the little sister story to Blood Over Bright Haven and I really liked it. You can read it here: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_...

"What the Omelans didn’t say was that their second grievance was due to the fact that the kid killers had broken the unspoken code: if you had a problem with the load-bearing suffering child, you were supposed to get the hell out of Omelas and keep it to yourself."

[terka · Rating 1 out of 5]

this was too stupid to put into words. the author is just kinda flailing around, shouting "look! look! this is what the metaphor of Omelas is for! load-bearing child!! hahaha I am so hilarious, do you get it? LOAD-BEARING CHILD!" while trying to not get cut on their own edge. Just embarassing, really. The kind of stuff an edgy teen would write to spite their English teacher.

[skein · Rating 4 out of 5]

So you know the story of Omelas -- it's a beautiful city where everything is great, except for one child who is locked in a hole it's entire life and just absorbing all the city's suffering. Everyone in Omelas is told this (at a certain age), and nearly all of them decide their own happiness is worth the cost of someone else's suffering.

LeGuin, being LeGuin, has a very clear and strong viewpoint on the moral thing to do here, and even if you haven't read the story, you can probably figure it out.

My issue (and it's a problem that a lot of people see) with LeGuin's story is that she ends it on the "walking away". Okay, so sure, one person felt badly about this suffering kid and they left, but the kid is still suffering and the city is still beautiful and happy, so the only thing that's been fixed is the titular characters' guilt. "At least I didn't participate in it!"
Bully for you.

Kim says: What have you done to stop it?
Why not just kill the kid?
And the answer is: because that doesn't help. Because Omelas is full of jerks, and they will just find another kid, and put THAT kid in the hole, and keep on being happy and un-suffering, and it doesn't matter how many children they sacrifice to the hole, they will keep doing it. As long as the child isn't their own child, they will continue to choose evil.

This is a very American story. The structure and response is American. And I would bet that a fair number of fingers pointing at the story are from people who firmly believe their country is better, and their people wouldn't choose to let one child suffer, etc etc etc, which is missing the point so hard they end up impaled on it.

Several people in the reviews here have complained that this isn't really as good as LeGuin's story because it doesn't respond to the premise, which is just fascinating to me, because nobody flinched from answering LeGuin's premise like LeGuin did.

[alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kim's short story doesn't rival Le Guin's, nor does it surpass it, but (in my opinion) it isn't supposed to. To try to one-up The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas would be to miss the point - though one thing it does have over the original is its sense of humour ("load-bearing suffering child" is a phrase I will not soon forget).

What Why Don't We Just Kill The Kid in the Omelas Hole does do is continue the conversation, and I loved what it had to say. I loved the updated language, as firmly situated in the present as the original is timeless. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant all-round.

[Lallo · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is another story about a “Load-bearing suffering child”

Obviously connected to “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Whereas Ursula’s story was more about ethics and personal choice. This one is more about our current society, and lets you draw your own metaphors to reality. Good story for sure, both of them.

[Andrew Somers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed this, even though I feel like Kim is in part disagreeing with something Leguin wasn't saying!

[Ethan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another riff on Le Guin's classic story (joining one a few years back by N. K. Jemisin, and I'm sure many others). This one is simultaneously more "meta" and more literal than Le Guin's more poetic and evocative thought experiment. It's hard not to compare Kim's story with Le Guin's, but that seems unfair. Nonetheless, an interesting continuation of and response to the thought experiment. I will probably return to this again, perhaps if/when I discuss the Le Guin story with students.

[Priyanka Dutt · Rating 4 out of 5]

What if utilitarianism were accepted and used as a governing principle?

[Robiok · Rating 4 out of 5]

Holy shit.
The full circle tragedy is rendered so fantastically.

I also would highlight the way the author uses the concept of ‘They’.

This is currently nominated for the Locus Mag award and i think the Hugo? Or Nebula? Regadless it deserves the recognition

[AoC · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty much what is says on the tin, really. I did appreciate the cheeky tone Why Don't We Just Kill The Kid in the Omelas Hole goes for with its short story about something admittedly horrible. By its very nature the story raises questions, parallels and metaphors.

Omelas is a perfect shining city on a hill where people have come to terms there must always be a load-bearing suffering child stuffed into a sound-proofed hole enduring pain for everyone's sake. That's how it has always been, after all. City needs more in more than philosophical sense as things very much go awry when the child isn't suffering. Freak disasters, power outages, inconveniences for everyone living in their Nice Houses. That is to say, all of Omelas. And then something odd happens - load-bearing suffering child is killed. So they put a new one in. Only for it to happen again, and again. Who is doing this and why?

Yes, this concept has been done before and I'd argue events taking place in modern day, with social media Omeleans have absolutely healthy relationship with unlike everyone else they tend to look down upon, is the real game changer. Everyone else catches up to what's going on and start disowning the city. Which doesn't stop tourists from visiting Omelas' beautiful beaches, though. This back-and-forth between city fathers and nation at large is used to convey mental gymnastics justifying things. After all, these are all ETHICALLY SOURCED children. Short story even lampoons mainstream speculations by presenting multiple possible theories. Then there's also the matter of handling the murderers who acknowledge what they're doing it while seeing it as preferable than to have a child suffer even if it is for city's very tangible benefit.

Would I recommend Why Don't We Just Kill The Kid in the Omelas Hole? That would depend heavily on what you get out of it. Surface-level story itself? Eh. Almost self-aware commentary and letting the reader interpret the scenario he will is where the real draw lies.

[Zzzzx · Rating 4 out of 5]

And that's just the rub with baked goods, and desserts, isn't it? They're a slow poison. Really nobody should eat baked goods or desserts but the ice cream man gets in his little truck and plays his little song to see kids smile. And make money I guess. But then those kids get fat and get acne and become very sad and how much of their immediate happiness is worth that? How much of the ice cream man's happiness? On a gradient I assume his happiness is worth less than theirs because he's older but I don't think that's the way the world works and that makes me sad. So probably the sum total of sadness here is more than the happiness actually.
When people get older they get addicted to eating sweets and candy and baked goods and ice cream and that makes their bodies ache and then they die. This too causes sadness for those around them. That's why I've resolved to never die. When the Grim Reaper knocks on my door I'll open the mail slot and shout through a respectful "no thank you" and then go about my life forever. I think the Grim Reaper is a lot like vampires in that he has to be invited in. He gets a lot of small invites in pieces of candy and ice cream cones and baked goods. And some big invites when people get really sad. However I have proven here today that sweets make sadness so if you eschew the former, well Mr Reaper stands on your lawn and shrugs and moves on to Mr Jorgenson across the street who is very sad indeed.

[Nadine in California · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title says it all, in theme and style - bringing Omelos' secret horror out into the open with a deadpan, satiric directness that pulls no punches. In Kim's contemporary Omelos, media (social and commercial) means the child isn't out of sight or mind. The complexities just get more complex:

Many non-Omelan people said a lot of very mean things (no one outside Omelas had a good and normal relationship with social media), like that the Omelans were monsters for letting the load-bearing suffering child exist and therefore everything about Omelas was fucked beyond belief.....This sentiment made the Omelans kind of upset. They pointed out that Omelas was a better place to live than most other places because at least you knew the load-bearing suffering child suffered for a reason, as opposed to all the other kids who were suffering for no reason. Out there, kids had their arms ripped off while they were working in chicken processing plants, kids were left in baby boxes, and kids lived in perfect quiet misery with one parent who was an alcoholic and another parent who beat them. In Omelas, there were only good parents and no child suffered except the single one who did. How dare you say shit about our fair city and our single child, when you won't even help your own.

[Chiththarthan Nagarajan · Rating 5 out of 5]

There should be a warning before reading this book, but then again, where's the warning before watching TV news or reading a newspaper? This story is closer to reality than news can ever be. It was a hard read, and the writer's use of utmost harshness to lighten the reality was notable.


"As a teenager, you were supposed to learn the blunt truth that your society was built on a single ongoing act of senseless, meaningless cruelty, and then you were supposed to cry about it or rage about it, but either way you were supposed to get over it and grow up and get on with your fully-paid-for-by-the-state education system and your festivals and your legal weed and your drooz."

"Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim.

[Ashleah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this author's prose and will absolutely be reading more from her.

This appears to be somewhat of a response to a classic Ursula K Le Guin short story, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. It has been quite some time since I've read that one, and I wish I'd reread it before starting this one.

There's a lot of social commentary here which hits pretty hard in our current climate, which is a hallmark of good philosophical sci-fi for me.

[Gabrielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very good short story.

[Erika Ensign · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting thought experiment following on from a genius thought experiment, but without the same pathos or sense of poetry.

[Teleseparatist · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked how angry it was, but didn't love it.

[Charlotte · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've read better Tumblr posts that take on Omelas.

[yk]

my 4th reread or so—i think about this story quite often, maybe even more than the original. kim and le guin are probably arguing with different walls, though.

[Ruby Scupp · Rating 4 out of 5]

• The kid was the drop of blood in the bowl of milk whose slight bitterness would make the sweetness of the rest of Omelas richer. Without the kid in the hole, Omelas was just paradise. With the load-bearing, suffering child, Omelas meant something.

• They promise that the children are ethically sourced. But there aren’t any citations.

• Most days, Omelas is sunny and beautiful and nothing bad happens. And then there will be a day that is overcast and cloudy, and on that day, people die in circus accidents and carbon monoxide leaks and start harassment campaigns on twitter. And sometimes on that day people die through lethal injection. So it’s clear that sometimes the kid is alive and suffering, and sometimes the kid has been killed and doesn’t exist. Or maybe there’s no kid anymore, and Omelas is just like everywhere else: lucky until it isn’t.

• And they (the ones who visit Omelas) say: Thank God we aren’t dealing with that horrid wound in society ... What a lesson for us. Thank God we don’t live there. Thank God we know it exists.

[Miriam · Rating 5 out of 5]

My nihilist, literary heart was very pleased by this.

Read it here: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_...

[giada · Rating 3 out of 5]

The novelette gives us a bold answer to the question many of us have asked ourselves while reading Ursula K. Le Guin's famous short story - what if we kill the Omelas kid? And once they replace them with a new one, what if we kill that one as well?
Taking Le Guin's initial idea of how a utopia might work and choosing the same choice of the trolley problem over and over again until the system glitches and Omelas doesn't resemble utopia anymore, I see this story as an exploration of modern western society with the original work as scaffolding only: the premise of Omelas is distorted to the point of becoming unrecognisable, but still I appreciated what the argument Kim was trying to push forward.

You can find the story in written and audio version for free on the fantasy and science fiction magazine Clarkesworld.

[Jan Nieszporski · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel like the primary issue that I have with this work is that unlike the story it is building upon, this does not invite the reader to make their own conclusions, but rather spoon-feeds the audience its intended message. The metaphor and philosophical conundrum of the initial piece feel quite watered down by just how in your face it all is. It's a piece that is certainly angry for good reason, and the fact that the story is explicit in its feelings helps the sheer (understandable) frustration of the author come across well, but there's a fine line between that and subtlety -- and "I'm an accelerationist." crosses well beyond it to an almost eye-rolling degree.

That being said: the story's certainly an interesting elaboration upon the original material. I do not think that it is an elaboration that fully approaches Le Guin's story as an honest attempt to completely build off of the original -- especially with how elements such as mentions that Omelas has a stock market despite the original explicitly stating that it does not, but that's a nitpick -- but it does, admittedly, present the reader with appropriately relevant philosophical parallels to the real world to be very interesting. I'm not sure if de-mystifying the world of Omelas fully is the correct way to go about it -- especially because I think Le Guin's piece thrives on how vague it is and how much it leaves to the audience to wonder -- but it definitely drives the point that it has home, which is a point that is important to make and that is very, very relevant in the modern day.

I guess all of this is to say that I don't think this tries to actually build upon the original story, but rather build on it -- in the process losing a lot of what made Le Guin's work so interesting -- which frustrates me as a big fan of the original.

[Inna · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Of course, nothing in the freak-outs materially touched the Omelans, because Omelas was a shining city on a hill that could only be hurt when there was no load-bearing suffering child, and the dead child had been immediately replaced, so Omelas wasn’t assaulted by foreign troops, and there were no trade sanctions against it, and people didn’t stop going to its beaches. But they had to do some media spin, and the Nice House Experiencers went on TV to reassure the world that the load-bearing suffering child was an ethically sourced, no one’s son, and definitely an Omelan, and meanwhile some of the Nice House Experiencers privately spoke among each other".

"By now everyone (except the newscasters) had stopped counting dead children, and nobody has any questions for the murderers anymore. The dead murderer was wrong. They haven’t run out of children. But they haven’t run out of murderers, either".

"Occasionally a content creator will walk into Omelas and film a video while standing on one of the balconies of the Nice Houses or while sitting on one of Omelas’ beautiful beaches. They will talk about the history of Omelas in the same way that people talk about the Uyghurs situation in China, the concentration camps of the Third Reich, the comfort women imported from Korea by Japan, the Belgium Congo, the Atlantic Slave Trade in relation to the American South, and the refugees who sink in ships off the coast of Western Europe.

And they (the ones who visit Omelas) say: Thank God we aren’t dealing with that horrid wound in society. Thank God there is somewhere that shows us how fucking bad things could get. What a pit in the ground. What a fucked up little trolley problem. What a lesson for us. Thank God we don’t live there. Thank God we know it exists".