Extract

With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas.

A city of impossible happiness glitters beside the sea, its festivals joyous, its children bright, its musicians flourishing in freedom that seems to lack nothing. Then Ursula K. Le Guin reveals the condition upon which all of it depends: a single child locked in a basement room, starving and terrified, whose suffering cannot be alleviated without destroying the happiness of everyone above. Every citizen must eventually learn of the child, and most, after their initial horror, accept the bargain. But some do not. They walk away, alone, into a darkness the narrator cannot describe. Published in 1973, this story of barely five pages remains one of the most precise moral thought experiments in literature, a question it refuses to answer.