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Differing Perspectives In Writing the Future

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It is hardly contestable that one of the primary uses of science fiction is that it is capable of writing the future, so to speak. Science fiction dares to imagine a future that history might take if certain novum were to be created or events to take place. Authors of science fiction ask that “What if?” question, then take the reader on the answer to that question. Sometimes, those answers inspire the people of today to create that world – as evidenced by the multitude of people today who attempt to build working lightsabres from Star Wars, who are inspired by the cast of Star Trek in their aerospace endeavors, and use the imagined future as evidence of what they should do today. However, the matter complicates itself when the novum switches from technology to more malleable subjects: a post-colonial universe (Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas), a cure to cancer that causes more issues than it solves (Octavia E. Butler’s The Evening and the Morning and the Night), or a history in which Egypt was never subservient to the world powers (P. Djeli Clark’s A Master of Djinn). From this perspective, science fiction authors are conjuring images from a world that is more than just technological advances, and so, too, are the effects more than just inventions of those technologies. One of the ways in which these authors confront hard questions is to change the perspective that the audience views them from.

"The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" is a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin in which the narrator asks the audience to imagine a utopia. From the beginning, the story reads differently from other stories due to the conversational nature the narrator takes with the reader, effectively breaking the fourth wall from the beginning of the story. While describing the happiness of the utopia called Omelas, the narrator talks directly to the audience, saying “I wish I could convince you… Perhaps it would be better if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all.” The perspective of Omelas that is given to the reader is one akin to a God’s eye view – the reader sees both the minute and the big picture; the individual thoughts and the hegemonic culture. Moreover, the explicit invitation to fill in the blanks of Omelas with the reader’s own utopia makes the reader a co-author of the story; given the scaffolding of Omelas, the reader is free to contribute to the makeup of the utopia being described. In this short story, the genre matches the form; the genre explores an unattainable futuristic utopia as a way to explore the ethics of such a society, and the form diverges from conventional storytelling by breaking the fourth wall and explicitly inviting the reader to share in the creation of the story they read. Instead of the general form of having a cast of characters, a protagonist, and plot, “The Ones who Walk away from Omelas” instead endows the status of co-author to the reader, breaking the fourth wall, and describes no characters, just a series of stock characters.

Le Guin creates the story in this way for two reasons. The first is that, generally speaking, the more a utopia is described, the more it falls apart. Each reader has their own version of utopia in their own head, and so Le Guin neatly works around the pitfalls of describing a utopia in too much detail by asking each reader to fill in the world around her scaffolding, making Omelas the ideal utopia for the reader. The other major reason for casting the short story like this is to embroil the reader-author of Omelas in the ethical situation. By inviting the reader to add to the mystique and the creation of Omelas, the narrator also forces the reader to be complicit with all of the moral and ethical implications that Omelas brings. Just as the children in Omelas first experience the happiness and prosperity of the utopia before being exposed to the price it costs to maintain the utopia, so too does the reader indulge in creative process before being forced to reckon with the ethical conundrum of the situation. When the narrator finally admits the scapegoat of Omelas as the child who has done nothing wrong, and yet must still bear the all of the negative effects of a society to set the rest of it free, the reader-author must confront the reality of the utopia that they helped create. By the time the reader-author realizes the negative aspect of their utopia, they are too intertwined in the creation of Omelas to look at it objectively. The reader-author must weigh the positives of their own utopia with the negative aspects of the scapegoat.


While Le Guin does not directly write the future in the way typical of other science fiction stories, Le Guin writes the ethical dilemma that reader-authors must contend with as they endeavor to create the kind of future they want. In the reality of our current world, what will reader-authors decide to do? To walk away or to continue existing in the utopia that depends on the exploitation of a scapegoat? For author N.K. Jemisin who writes a response to Le Guin’s short story entitled “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” in a collection called How Long Til Black Future Month?, the answer is neither: the answer is to fight for a better world that is more just for all. Jemisin rejects the two options that Le Guin creates, and instead creates a third option that she feels best contends with the situation. Implicit in Jemisin’s response is a critique of the assumption that race relations will solve itself through the lens of being color blind. The repeated attempt by various science fiction authors to deal with the race problem by being color-blind is that it “Enables discussion of race and prejudice on a level of abstraction while stifiling a more important discussion about real, material conditions, both historical and contemporary. And by presenting racism as an insanity that burned itself out, or as the obvious folly of the ignorant and impoverished who would be left behind by the genre’s brave new futures, [science fiction] avoids confronting the structures of racism and its own complicity in them.” By avoiding the topic of race in utopia and science fiction, the history of racism rings in the hollow spaces where it is left out. Jemisin, however, creates a version of Omelas that is not color-blind, and is instead multicultural. Because of this, the ethical question changes.

This page has paths:

  1. The Three Ghosts of Science Fiction Past, Present, and Future Adelmar Ramirez

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