{"id":2066086,"date":"2025-10-03T07:15:52","date_gmt":"2025-10-03T07:15:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2066086"},"modified":"2025-10-03T07:15:52","modified_gmt":"2025-10-03T07:15:52","slug":"walking-away-from-omelas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/walking-away-from-omelas\/","title":{"rendered":"Walking Away From Omelas"},"content":{"rendered":"

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CHRISTOPHER SLATSKY IS THE AUTHOR of two collections of horror fiction. His second, The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature<\/a><\/em>, from 2020, includes not just short fiction, but essays on horror, poetry, and even a play. Through no fault of his own, Slatsky operates on the fringes of horror, since this once-inclusive genre has fractured, roughly speaking, into two groups, which I might categorize as Serious Horror Fiction (Slatsky, Thomas Ligotti, Reggie Oliver, et al.) and Mainstream Slasher Movie Nostalgia Porn. His story \u201cPhantom Airfields\u201d builds a surreal nightmare around a well-known mysterious photographic image known as the \u201cSolway Firth Spaceman<\/a>\u201d (it\u2019s worth looking up). In \u201cProfessor Cognoscente\u2019s Caliginous Charms Carnival,\u201d what begins as a seemingly run-of-the-mill story about an evil carnival ringmaster transforms by the end into something far more horrible, something to do with failure, waste, disease, and disability, a tale that left me profoundly uncomfortable by the end.<\/p>\n

The title novella of the aforementioned collection, \u201cThe Immeasurable Corpse of Nature,\u201d strongly suggests that inducing discomfort in the reader\u2014mental, emotional, and at times even edging toward the physical\u2014is where Slatsky flourishes. The story is about a forensic pathologist named Mina Fawn. Her job has her traveling the world and cataloguing, investigating, and recording evidence of mass casualties in places like Rwanda, a career that she is only beginning to acknowledge has become hazardous for her:<\/p>\n

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She was embarking into what was sure to be a parade of repulsive and heartbreaking discoveries. . . . It was always a balancing act\u2014Mina found the science and processes involved in studying human remains fascinating, exhilarating even, but exposure to tragedies and the depths of depravity humanity was capable of had grown harrowing over time. The faces of babies who\u2019d been beaten so badly they\u2019d lost an eye, or finding different levels of healing in a dead child\u2019s rib fracture marking their history of abuse like tree rings never ceased to weigh on her.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At the scene of one particularly horrific murder\u2014again, of children\u2014Mina finds a baggie of heroin, which she snatches up before the investigators can see it. Though she deludes herself into believing she is not an addict, heroin has become her escape of choice.<\/p>\n

Mina\u2019s current assignment is to travel with an old colleague, Dr. Genet, to the Pacific Northwest, where there has been a mass cult suicide. The cult was started by a once-respected biologist and environmentalist named Dr. Karen Solberg. For years, the commune she created flourished, but along the way something poisoned the well. Solberg became a devotee of anti-natalism, a nihilistic philosophy that claims procreation is evil, the height of cruelty. It can be summed up by the first item in one of Solberg\u2019s manifestos: \u201cLet our species die out.\u201d Solberg, we are told, named her collective \u201cThe Ones Who Walk Away after an Ursula K. Le Guin story she was reportedly obsessed with.\u201d<\/p>\n

Le Guin\u2019s 1973 short story, \u201cThe Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas<\/a>,\u201d is one of the most famous and best-read short stories of all time; in its brief six or seven pages, Le Guin posits a society in which the people are exquisitely joyous, free of all care. It is a society not precisely like ours, but not pre-modern: \u201cThese were not simple folk. They were not less complex than us.\u201d Their freedom and their joy come at a cost, however. Le Guin explains that their depthless happiness is only possible because in one of the big buildings in Omelas is a small basement, a single, tiny room, in which the young child who lives in it can do no more than sit or stand. The child, boy or girl (who knows?), is regularly beaten, fed just enough to keep him or her alive. The child is abused, treated cruelly, and has been for years. Worse, the child wasn\u2019t born into this but can \u201cremember sunlight and his mother\u2019s voice.\u201d The child begs to be released, promises to be good, and is ignored. No one is permitted to speak kindly to the child. And this<\/em> abomination is why Omelas succeeds.<\/p>\n

Worse, from a moral perspective, is that the people of Omelas know of this child and accept its suffering as the cost of doing business:<\/p>\n

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Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies depend wholly on this child\u2019s abominable misery.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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ONCE YOU\u2019VE READ BOTH STORIES, the connections beneath the surface become apparent. If Slatsky himself is an anti-natalist, he at least wrestles with it. The character Dr. Genet hates anti-natalism, dismissing it as high-toned whining and calling it (accurately, I\u2019d say) \u201cthe philosophy of the privileged.\u201d She adds, \u201cHow much inconvenience can I experience before I can justify condemning it as suffering?\u201d<\/p>\n

Mina pretends not to think about any of this, while sinking deeper into it, seeing things at the massacre site others don\u2019t: bizarrely thin figures in the distance; scarecrows strewn about, from one of which Mina secretly pulls a human tooth. Not a tooth that had been placed there, but that had grown there. And as the horrors of the massacre\u2014not a mass poisoning, but a mass shooting, a mass beating, a mass throat-slitting\u2014increase in strangeness, the heroin takes hold, and she reflects on her place as a lonely Korean woman who believes herself ugly, who was adopted as a baby by a kind, American Christian couple, wondering if her birth parents, whom she\u2019s never tried to find, ever think of her\u2014\u201cOr was she a memory lost to decay?\u201d\u2014reflecting that \u201cEverything was transitional. The world was amorphous. Everyone changed depending on their own selfish desires.\u201d<\/p>\n

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