There were comments on reviews soon after the episode was released saying it was based on a script that predated publication of Omelas; I guess that wasn't the case
For me the most heartbreaking line in LeGuin’s story also marks an important difference from the SNW episode: “Please let me out, I’ll be good.” Because it implies that (unlike the First Servant) the child in Omelas *does not understand* what is being done to them, and is denied even whatever consolation might come from knowing the purpose their suffering serves. The Omelas child appears to think they are enduring a punishment because they were bad in some way, and might someday be released if they promise to be good, which the reader knows will never happen. That’s the line that punches me in the gut hardest whenever I read the story.
I think one important difference between the two stories is that in “The Ones Who Walk Away From Oomlas”, it seems to me that it is implied that the people are doing this for their own comfort. They seem to do this because rather than share their burdens and suffering, they choose to put all their suffering on one person. In the Star Trek story their very survival depends on this child’s sacrifice. A city falling is pretty catastrophic very few people (if any) will survive.
@@scribblingjoe The argument that their survival depends on the sacrifice only holds up if you assume that it's impossible to evacuate a city, even given centuries in which to do it. Sure, in the short term of needing a replacement battery to slot into the torture chair, the choice is sacrifice the child or plummet to death, but the day after the ascension ceremony, they could work on any of a number of solutions that would sacrifice their utopian comfort but not threaten their lives.
That’s a really wonderful point. My heartbreak, especially given the nature of the world we’re living in, comes with this: “They know the child is there, all the people of Omelas. They know that it has to be there.” And, of course, the sentence that serves both as the story’s title and conclusion, that has and will continue to haunt me for the rest of my life.
I swear, you'd think Starfleet would have a form for potential host planets to fill out before a ship visits them. "Do you certify that you're civilization is not powered by the continuous suffering of one (or several) small child?" "Do you certify that any member of our crew will not be executed if they accidentally break a window while playing football?" etc.
Yeah, how many times now have Federation vessels e countered seeming utopias, then it turns out its because htey eat puppies or something. Also, isn't the Federation mean tot be a utopia? That bit always puzzled, me, when the Enetprise show sup and Data or whomever goes "the society of bumfluff 7 has no war or crime or poverty", why doesn't picard say "Oh, you mean like us? but we also have replicators"m "yeah, you're right, what a s**t hole!"
@@standardnerd9840 The ship's Chief First-contact Officer will presumably also remind all landing party personnel about the nature of informed consent. Walking around half-naked (from the perspective of an outsider) is not an excuse for sexual assault by the outsider. Also, landing party personnel should be reminded on how to avoid transmitting anything they are carrying to the natives, who have no conception of extraterrestrial venereal diseases (reference to what happened when Polynesian natives met horny, syphilis- and gonorrhea-infected European sailors.)
A voice in my head started screaming "Sanctuary! Sanctuary!" as Omelas, Logan's Run, Strange New Worlds, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame all melted together.
But the boy in Omelas and the First Servant in Star Trek don't get murdered. They might wish at times that they were. Their fate is worse than death -- they're both going to suffer for as long as they can keep him alive.
That Ursula Le Guin story is way more heartbreaking, haven't stopped thinking about it all day. I suppose Star Trek didn't want to go that dark even though the acting on that kid having one moment of fear just before he gets connected was also horrific.
I did catch up with the short story after reading about the similarities between it and this SNW episode. In agree with you that this is a case of inspiration rather than adaptation. Indeed, when I first saw this episode, I was reminded of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," wherein a small town regularly has a lottery, the "winner" of which is stoned to death, for reasons lost to collective memory but enshrined in tradition. If the lottery were not held, if the child in Omalas were freed, it the First Servant were not connected to the machine, would their communities still thrive? Perhaps, but no one seems to have the courage to find out.
It would be interesting to question Spock about what he thought of the situation from an ethical pov. Of course there's the obvious evasion that it was bad from a practical pov.
But in that case, Spock was making the choice to sacrifice himself for the lives of his shipmates. It could be argued that the First Servant in the SNW episode was too young to make that choice for himself.
America was founded upon the principle of protecting the individual's rights ( to equality ) from the potential happiness of the few.......... How very far......... we have strayed
That was actually Spock quoting John Stuart Mill on the subject of Utilitarianism, which promotes the value of the greatest good for the greatest number of people. It was brought up on another thread in connection with a criticism of “Omelas” made by author N. K. Jemison and others: that those who didn’t approve of the arrangement should have freed the child instead of merely walking away. Which objection, to my mind, totally misreads the point that Le Guin was making - the citizens of Omelas *aren’t* bad people deliberately perpetrating an unjust system. They are, in fact, sensitive to the child’s suffering, and deeply regret it, but have made the moral calculus that any alternative, in terms of overall suffering, would be worse. That’s actually a defensible argument, and one used every day in our world to justify far greater cruelty than that visited upon a single child, and to far less benefit. This is what Le Guin referred to as “the American dilemma” in the story’s introduction, and it gets more pertinent to our own situation with every passing day.
You'd be hard pressed to find a writer in the information age with something akin to an original thought. Stealing isn't the same as being inspired. Maybe I'm just too much of a media hound, when I see 1950s western episodes being redone in Star Trek and then find out the Westerns were derivative from pulp dramas in the 1920s, and those were from plays in the 1800s, and on and on. As one wise man once said a long time ago "There is nothing new under the sun."
Or Poul Anderson (Hugo Award x7, Nebula Award x3). Any movie, show, or story about an organization that governs or attempts to regulate time travel are all copying Poul Anderson's "Time Patrol" stories, the first of which was published in 1955. Department of Temporal Affairs: Star Trek "Time Cop" (1994) "El ministerio del tiempo" (2015-2020) "Time Cop" comic (1992) The Temps Commission: The Umbrella Academy The Federal Time Bureau: Legends of Tomorrow Time Agency, Time Lords (Dr. Who) and countless other treatments of the concept pioneered by Anderson.
The Great age of science fiction, really came in each generation of new writers. But the Giants like Philip k dick, Frederick Brown, Ursula LeGuin, in many others that we don't normally talk about, as well as the ones that we always talk about like Asimov, Arthur c Clarke... The fact is we've had fantastic writers in each generation and sci-fi has been the great exploration... Not of the fantastic worlds, but of the human frailties, flaws, virtues... Ursula was probably the best of them all. Her writing is deep in ways that only the absolute masters of all time have ever managed. And that's saying a lot because we had many and still do in science fiction writing, I'm perfectly okay with stories being repeated in new interesting ways
Le Guin's Omelas story is the kind of thing meant for a Star Trek episode which makes episodes and societies based entirely on thought experiments all the time. Surprised there wasn't a ToS or TNG episode that does this.
TOS "The Cloud Minders" touches on this. Floating City powered by ore dug by downtrodden miner class. It's a bit tangent to Omelas, but still you can draw comparisons.
Possibly. But when "borrowing" whole cloth from a weaver, the weaver deserves credit. And in this instance, the multi-million dollar behemoth that is Star Trek, REFUSED to give ANY credit to Le Guin...
In the Earthsea books, we learn that the word for rock (like, what the earth is made of) in True Speech is tolk and that for the sea is inien. Make of that what you will.
@@pillmuncher67 Because AS it is stated in Earth-Sea... "To know the name of something is to RULE the thing!" That's why no one used their REAL Name in public... to keep from being controlled. Like in the Earth-Sea pre-qual short story about "Mr. Underhill" because he lived under a hill... But no one knew that he was REALLY a Dragon in disguise!
Several lifetimes ago when I was doing my undergrad degree, I took a course titled, "Science Fiction As Literature." TLHoD occupied about half the entire semester and it was like an endless onion -- layer upon layer upon layer. I don't think we ever got all the way down to the bottom because we had other books the prof insisted we had to cover in class, but... wow.
One important question is: did James Cameron rip off Ursula Le Guin's story, The Word For World Is Forest, when making Avatar, and the answer to that is...100% yes.
AND Heinlein. (Everyone forgets that one!) "I see you"? Came from the lesser-known (but still masterful) Heinlein novel, "Double Star." Cameron appears to be a f**king magpie -- he'll snatch up any bright, shiny object and just squirrel it away til he can find a use for it.
Have you read any Discworld? The first two books are a constant riff off of Tolkien, Fritz Leiber, McCaffrey, Mervyn Peake, Lovecraft, Poe..... No dedications whatsoever. Later it got a bit less easy riffing and more substantial social satire (A LeGuin influence!!!) but pTerry never stopped satirising fantasy and SF tropes. LeGuin (who he knew personally) he totally ransacked for ideas and tropes. The development of how pTerry treats gender in the Dwarven community is a playful turnaround of the Left Hand of Darkness, 100% taken from Ursula. (And a reason Discworld and Potterheads don't mix that well anymore :/ ) Go have a look at the brilliant Lspace Annotated Pratchett File :D And Pratchett and Gaiman? They were some kind of hive mind :D and constantly used each others ideas. I have met them both, but never saw them together.......
I think we all resonate with the “Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach” and “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” stories is they reflect, indirectly, the way our current society is set up. He who shall not be named referred to the US as the “shining city upon a hill” much like the floating cities in the Star Trek episode, but what children are suffering to support our lifestyle in this shining city? Have an EV car? Some of the minerals used to create the batteries for EVs have major issues with child labor when mined. Don’t have an EV? What about a smartphone? The same minerals are used in batteries for smartphones. This is just one example of an industry with child labor issues. There are many others both known and suspected. As I write this, Republicans are trying to roll back child labor laws that have protected children in the US for over a century. If you live in the developed world, especially if you live in the US, these suffering children should be on your mind everyday, but who among us would be willing to walk away from Omelas?
Good point. Also, it’s easier to save one child who everyone knows the location of - than hundreds of thousands unknown and far away. Our ‘cities of eternal summer’ provide less paradise but have dug the system that supports it far deeper.
I am glad that you shared this. But there is so much more. Ursula Le Guin said that she rewrote the story of Khronos, changing the old man who was entrapped by the Watchers with a child because it tugged at the heartstrings more strongly. 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas', William James's 'The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life', as well as Fourier, Bellamy, Morris, Wells, and Dostoyevsky, among many others have reworked the Khronos/Cronos story of the sleeper to comment on current culture. It is a story as timeless as the Suffering Servant. Do haters desire to trash all of the great ancient works and ban them from modern interpretations on the immutable conditions of being? I applaud all of these authors.
Left Hand of Darkness & The Lathe of Heaven are works by Leguin that are still very memorable for me. The Wizaed of Earthsea is sketchier in my mind for some reason. The Left Hand of Darkness definitely expanded my mind regarding gender binaries & gender roles some 40 odd years ago. It's amazing how relevant that novel is to current events considering when it was written.
Glad you mentioned James at the end. The whole concept originates in criticisms of moral consequentialism and anyone familiar with the arguments could easily wrap a setting around such thought experiments; crafting a plot and characters is the part that makes the episode good
@@jayanderson9375 Does it need to be? At some point whatever you did just becomes part of the genre. You can’t really get mad at somebody from taking ideas from a book that was written multiple decades ago probably
@@Kalmera6238 There are no legal ways to enforce that. 99.99% of modern writing is inspired by someone else's work. Christopher Paolini was inspired by JRRTolken, and yes he admits this in interviews but not in his books. George RR Martin is even inspired by others. So was Robert Jordan and lots of other artists. Some admit this, some don't. I say, if it is not breaking actual laws, why should this be a problem? I think this video is about getting views, and creating drama where none should exist. :(
Never knew about this before I saw the episode, but I had just re-read a compendium of Le Guin's short stories, _"The Wind's Twelve Quarters"_ a few weeks earlier and so it didn't take me long to realize that the story was very reminiscent of _"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"_ . This wouldn't even be the first time one of Le Guin's stories inspired Trek - her Hanish series novel _"The Left Hand of Darkness"_ was a direct inspiration for the Next Generation 5th season episode _"The Outcast"_ and from that series her _"Law of Cultural Embargo”_ is pretty much the root inspiration for the Federation's General Order 1: The Prime Directive.
One of the things I missed in Voyager and some of DS9 and TNG (and of course ENT) was the "poetry titles" that TOS and TAS used. I haven't caught SNW yet, but I am pleased to see that tradition is back!
I've been trying to get my partner into Trek for a year, and strange new worlds is where it finally stuck. We're both neurodivergent. Her reaction to this episode was really something - she hated on Pike for trying to save the kid. "How dare he not respect her culture! He's supposed to be enlightened!" I know her reaction will be well in the minority, but I love that nutrek spawned a series so well written that we can talk philosophy over each episode.
Starship Captains, like paramedics/er staff, should never say "it'll be/it's been quiet/slow/uneventfull." That's a sure fire way for things to get set off into a massive hellscape of chaos. Now, I would be inclined to say that the episode feels more like a homage to Le Quin's story Those Who Walk Away. Even if the writers of Star Trek SNW had taken the story beat for beat, the perspective is vastly different. In the Those Who Walk Away, we are given the information from a resident of Omelas, whereas in the episode our perspective is that of the crew of the Enterprise. I don't know, that's just how I see it.
I think this episode is honestly one of the stories that shows a weakness in SNW. They spend the entire episode building up to the dramatic reveal (that pretty much anyone could guess long before it's revealed), and basically no time examining it and what it really means to the society. No time discussing how the society might try to extricate itself from this situation and the reasons why they haven't. It's a huge missed opportunity. In fact, it's so focused on drama, that "Tots Drama" must be the 4th pillar of their society, because there's no reason for them to show the ceremony to Pike and act like they'd have no idea how he'd react. They've spent the entire damn episode hiding what's going on exactly because they know the reaction will be bad.
I think this is the wrong way to look at it. On some level, the story is not about the society powered by the forsaken child; it's about how *Pike* reacts to learning about the society powered by the forsaken child. He has lots of reasons to look at this situation and accept the bargain they made; the city is beautiful, Elora is beautiful and (seemingly) kind, their medical technology offers him an escape from the sacrifice he knows he must make. And yet, even with all that, he can't shut down the voice telling him that this child's suffering is *wrong* once he pieces it together. Just because the audience can figure this out before Pike does is no bad thing. Dramatic irony like this is also a way to heighten tension and provide a sense of looming dread, which is what this story does.
@@pjlusk7774 except we basically have no time to see his reaction or how he deals with it, because it's the very end of the episode instead of taking real time in the episode for him to demonstrate how he feels and reacts. All there is is shock value even in his reaction. There's just not much substance to that. And it isn't like his reaction tells us anything meaningful about his character or anything else. In fact, it's pretty much the same reaction you'd expect from anyone. All I want is for them to put some work into thoughtful sci-fi, and this fell short quite a bit.
Bingo. That is one of the reasons I am not a fan of this show. The characters do stupid things. They hide a daughter in need of medical treatment instead of actively searching for a way to get the treatment needed. They sleep with an old flame without establishing anything remotely interesting about her. And do not get me started on the whole knowlege of the future thing.
The more active role of the Ones Who Walk Away in the Trek episode is important to me, because it's what always bothered me about the original story. It never sat with me that they just left, instead of actively trying to do something to help the imprisoned child.
This is something I thought and thought about as a kid when I first read the story, how could they not see how terrible it is? Why don't they try to save the child? And at least for me, I came to think of those that walk away as damaged by their 'perfect' society. so damaged by their culture that they won't try to help the child, that their only thought is to escape for themselves. And it has sat with me, that maybe how you are raised or the society that created you might have such a large effect on you that your morals, your sense of right and wrong becomes twisted. And I think this shows that the child bares the brunt of the abuse, many who see or know about the child are abused on their own way lesser surely, but still abused.
The ability to successfully fight for the child implies the ability to break the laws of Omelas, in which case it contradicts the premise that the abuse of the child make the society perfect including presumably perfectly free of crime. Whether such perfection is even coherently imaginable is a hard one. The premise is kind of tricky to make coherent and by giving it mechanics the Star Trek episode makes it possible to imagine ways around the bizarre iron-clad arrangement posited, whether fighting to free the child or creating some non-child torturing technological alternative. Edit: So I went and read the story, Omelas may or not be free of crime (and may or may not have laws) but it is "free of guilt" and letting the child run free would is explicitly described as introducing "guilt" into the city. So the story does indeed premise the impossibility of anyone freeing the child.
Getting inspiration is never a bad thing. Ursula paid tributes in her own work. If the writers of SNW had straight up taken the story word for word and used it as their own, which would have been very hard for the reasons you identified, then there would have been an issue. A credit in the episode would have been nice though.
There's a more on the nose version of this story from Doctor Who, wherein the futuristic city of London is flying through space on the back of an enslaved space whale and the population votes to either keep it enslaved or set it free. And every time they vote to keep it, then erase their memories so they can sleep soundly. In that version the children going missing aren't the ones being imprisoned, they are the ones aware of the horrible truth. Other than the memory thing, and the surprise twist that the missing children weren't the ghastly secret the major difference is that they eventually choose to stop torturing the animal and it turns out that it's far more willing to help by going faster when it's not tortured. I think like many Who stories it's a bit overwrought and lacks subtlety. But the influence is there.
@Oasus It is possible to adapt classic stories into the Star Trek universe. Back in the 70s, the animated Star Trek series adapted Larry Niven's Known Space story, "The Soft Weapon" into a Star Trek episode. They kept Niven's Kzinti (humanoid feline aliens), but substituted Spock for the Puppeteer Nessus. They also credited Niven.
@@photoboyjet Well... Larry adapted his own story, which is why he is credited as the writer. He was friends with DC Fontana, who talked him into providing a story.
I did not know about Le Guin, so upon seeing the episode, I mostly thought of parallels to "The Lottery" by Shirley Jacskson. Your summary did not indicate how the child is chosen in Le Guin story and I quick search on the web did not seem to yield an answer. So maybe it is left ambiguous. But in the Trek episode it is absolutely a lottery. Also, I do not recall the episode giving an explanation as to why another child can't just be plugged into the machine if something happened to the lottery "winner". The implication seems to be that physically any child will make the machine run. But that the system that keeps the public willing to accept the suffering of the child is very delicate and requires the ritualism to keep going. Where it not for the established traditions the city has built around the rituals, more people could start to object and bring the society down. So even in an emergency, where the first servant is replaced last minute due to a kidnapping or assassination, any deviation could devastate the system they have worked out.
I think (?) it is explicit in the episode that the First Servant has received a bunch of implants and other adjustments over a period of months or years (since birth?) to prepare to be plugged into the machine. So if the child is not available to be plugged in they can't just grab another random child. Although if my entire civilization depended for its existence I'd probably prepare a couple of spare potential first servants in the wings in case something happened to the primary one. So yeah the lack of spares is probably a sign of the complex dance of ritual and lottery.
@@allanolley4874 I'd have to watch it again (only seen once). But I remember the preparation to be more like pampering with the best education and toys and care (fattening a pig for slaughter) and brainwashing, since the ritual involves getting the kid to answer a question to indicate they agree to get hooked up to the machine. Although the one kid doesn't give an answer and his face says he was not really committed to sparkle motion. So the consent is ultimately sought but not needed. The implants that I remember were something that I thought everyone in the city had to regulate their health.
For me, I believe Omelas did inspire the episode, but I feel there is a fundamental point of difference in the two that changes the entire dynamic of the premise, which I feel most people are ignoring. The Enterprise Crew. They are outsiders who are there to function as Judge, Police, Executioners. Le Guin's story is about the natives of Omelas and the reader judging the morality of the situation. The Star Trek episode is about the Enterprise Crew & the writers judging the morality of the situation.
I do agree that "rip-off" or other such terms go too far. But this really does raise the question, "How close is too close to no longer only be 'inspired by' a previous work?" It may be a semantics thing mostly, but it does have legitimate repercussions insofar as things like crediting and citing previous creators and remuneration and compensation for the use of that work. I don't know where that line lies. It's a tricky situation, only compounded by all the times that big companies do this very thing to be able to "use" a work without paying for the "rights" to use the work.
The Original Series ripped off Robert Heinlein's Puppet Masters novel in the episode where flying creatures would attach themselves on the backs of humans and control them. Kirk's brother was in this episode and died due to these creatures.
@@willmfrank I think the old TV series, "The Starlost" from Harlan Ellison is more closely conforming to "Orphans of the Sky" than "FTWIHAIHTTS." Interesting that it ("Starlost") was made without anyone going after Ellison, but the producers of "The Terminator" settled Ellison's suit accusing them that they ripped off his "Outer Limits" story, "The Soldier," which I think was even more distantly related to Terminator than anything described here, and itself could be said to be descended from H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" for out-of-time travellers who sacrifice their presents for a better futures. Heinlein himself, in his stories, sometimes made this "borrowing" explicit with characters saying variants of, "writers just file the serial numbers off an old story and submit it as new."
Omelas spelled backwards is Salemo, which is of course very close to Salem (of witch trials fame). Yet it's semitic root means "peace", as the Arabic "salaam" and Hebrew "shalom" show. That was also the root of King Solomon's name, the wisest king in the Bible. The Bible tells the story of how Solomon decided the case of two women who came to him, both claiming to be the mother of the same infant boy. In order to reveal by their reactions which one loved the boy most (and thus presumably was the real mother), he acted as though he'd decided to kill the baby, but then awarded him to the woman who was willing to do whatever it took to save him. So, perhaps Le Guin played on the double-edged sword of the historical and religious connotations of the word Salem, while also invoking a kind of reverse symmetry that invites us to see ourselves as in a mirror. Or then again, maybe my weird penchant for spelling things backwards is running away with me...
That’s also similar, but is different in a few specific ways. For starters, it’s not a member of the society being sacrificed, it’s an outsider (the space whale). It’s not that the SNW ep has some similarities to Le Guin’s story-it’s that the setup is damn near identical.
I was checking to see if someone else got there before me-glad you did! Yes, I think Doctor Who’s The Beast Below definitely feels inspired by Those Who Walk Away from Omelas, and I really love it for that. Even with the differences (and there *should* be differences, otherwise it really would be an unauthorized adaptation), it has much of the same emotional punch, the unthinkable “bargain” between the torment of a sentient being and the well being of an entire civilization. The concept of children is worked in very movingly, as the motivation for the whale’s actions. The episode is very Whovian in how it honors Le Guin’s work, since the Doctor often concerns themself with the idea that all sentient beings deserve compassion and care. I’ve never really understood the notion of different creative takes on similar themes being “rip offs”-on the contrary, I think it’s important to explore the meaning of such themes from different perspectives. For me, it deepens understanding.
Sometimes I think people confuse tropes with entire concepts, and this is the case with Strange New Worlds' "Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach." Le Guin didn't really pioneer the trope of "Powered by a Forsaken Child" that both her short story and the SNW episode operate on - you can trace this trope all the way back to mythology across a variety of different belief systems and religions. I don't think creative use of a literary trope really requires an explicit "inspired by" or "based on" acknowledgement, personally speaking - so Robin Wasserman and Bill Wolkoff don't really need to thank Le Guin specifically, just as Le Guin doesn't need to thank the individual historians who preserved ancient mythology. Now if more specific elements of Le Guin's work were employed I'd say my view would change, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. The two stories stand well enough on their own, in my view, and in many ways tell a different story despite sharing a core similarity.
I'm torn. I definitely feel like it maybe doesn't *rip off* the story but it definitely lifts heavily from it, specifically the components of the suffering child kept in the dark below the city, the festival, etc. But did it also expand on in the context of SNW's characters and arching themes of self-sacrifice, destined pain, and such? Totally and that adds a different nuance that the original story didn't have for obvious reasons. I'm just not sure, it still doesn't entirely sit well with me... I think I would've at least liked a credit footnote or something saying "inspired by" or "in memory of LeGuin" or something that would've fended off these discussions of plagiarism etc etc
I think it's funny the fact that no one knows where the copying versus stealing quote comes from, is probably because everyone who said it was "stealing" the quote from someone else
It's Mark Twain he said: "There is no such thing as an original idea." He argues we can turn old ideas into new, curious combinations, but he reckoned they are “the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.”
I mean strictly maybe no one knows for absolute sure but Quote Investigator Dot Com has an article on it and they do really good work, so you can learn a great deal about who said things like that quote over the years and how it came to be attributed to various people. Reading it TS Eliot did actually write in a 1920 essay "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal" and that may be the earliest instance of that sort of sentiment, As Abraham Lincoln said "There are a lot of badly attributed quotes on the internet." 😉 Luckily there are also some good ways to look them up on the internet.
This is also a very notorious and most famous thought experiments in philosophy: "The Trolley Problem" It states: "A train is barreling down a track at five people. You’re in position to throw a switch, diverting the train to another track where it would only hit one person. So here’s your choice: Should you let the five people die, or make an active choice to kill the one person?"
Le Guin was an amazing author. Her works still to this day help me cope with some of the harsh realities of life. Steve to you, I recommend, the poem “The Valley”. It’s one of the best things ever put to paper and I still get choked up reading it aloud. Cheers buddy.
Something I didn't really appreciate until watching this video's recap is how vital the subplot with M'Benga's daughter is to making the whole story work. The Omelas thought experiment is only really interesting if the sacrifice of the child involves a tradeoff that is *understandable* even if it's not morally acceptable. The problem is that life in the Federation, at least on the core/home planets, is *already* generally depicted as pretty utopian, and they seem willing to share non-military tech and resources with other already-advanced species. But against that backdrop, the Omelas tradeoff doesn't seem like a genuine moral quandary: A society that tortures a kid to make already incredibly comfortable and wealthy people like 2% better off is not making some appalling but comprehensible tradeoff; they're just irredeemable sadists. You couldn't sell it as something otherwise decent-seeming people are able to rationalize. The M'Benga subplot drives home that, idyllic as it might normally seem, there's still plenty of disease and death and suffering there that the people on Majalis avoid. Which pushes the Majalan society back into the realm of "interesting moral quandary" rather than just making them cartoonishly monstrous. At least if you don't think about it too hard, since it's implied the Majalans *could* share their medical tech with the Federation if they wanted, and that at least some of it would work without the whole child torture machine. But shh, never mind that.
It's interesting - M'Benga is stuck on the wrong side of the Majalen's own general order one. To me both civilisations are applying general order one to prevent less advanced civilisations misapplying advanced technology - they can't ensure the tech isn't misapplied unless the other civilisations _share their morals_. The federation's test is "can you work together well enough as a civilisation to crack this incredibly difficult scientific task". The majelans one is "can you live here, where none of us suffer except one willing sacrifice, and accept our solution to the trolley problem as valid". It is a valid solution, just not a humanly popular one.
@@tomharrison1393 I thought that the sacrifice of that child is what makes the medicine work, and that they did not want to share with people who would would not sacrifice on their own but would instead condemn them
Bear in mind one terrifying similarity between three characters. This episode was all about three people who were destined to live out their lives stuck in a big chair.
There's a line from John Hodgman's book More Information Than You Require that has always stuck with me: "Ideas are not property, they are infections. They have no allegiance to their host body: they pass from brain to brain untraceably, or simply break out spontaneously, separated by continents or even centuries, without explanation." I always try to keep it in mind during conversations like this. No idea is truly original; our creativity comes from combining ideas into new forms. The only "ripping off" is repeating combinations that have already been tried.
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omalas was hugely influential. It's to the point where there's an entire entry on TVtropes, "Powered By A Forsaken Child." I'm not really sure if it counts anymore. It's like saying that all space opera sci-fi is a ripoff of Forbidden Planet. That being said, JK Rowling definitely ripped off Le Guin with the wizard school, but that's a whole other issue.
Thank you so much for addressing the issue of "ripping off" another work. People like to claim this all the time about TV series, and I think if's usually unjustified. A great story can be made over and over again and still find new things to teach us.
I think most of the best episodes of _Trek_ from across all of its series and movies are variations on existing sci-fi stories. It's not stealing to explore an idea someone else already examined.
When I watched the episode I had never heard of the Omelas story and Le Guin has only ever been in my periphery.. To me, the story seemed really parallel to present day arguments against gun laws in the US. "Thoughts and prayers for the children who suffer but there's simply nothing we can do." Based on your summary and quotes from Omelas, I get the same vibe but in a much broader sense of a general criticism of our capitalistic system-- we all know that people suffer under the weight of it but "obviously it's better this way because of all the prosperity afforded to the rest of us" (quotes because it's not my opinion). For me, it was both interesting thought experiment and horrifying commentary on our current reality.
People/children will still die no matter what political system is followed, so better to have the maximum amount of personal freedoms rather than being enslaved under the yolk of tyranny that “tries” to keep everyone safe. It’s not possible.
I once translated the same concept from LeGuin into a RPG scenario. The players didn't know the short story beforehand and that put them into the position of choosing what to do. I think this kind of story is even better when they are translated into interactive media (RPG, videogame or similars), that gives weight to the moral dilemma when the public doesn't only observe it, but partakes in it.
I mean, if you're gonna "steal," steal from the best, right? But I actually think that this isn't a case of theft so much as conscious, genuine homage to LeGuin. I'm glad you mentioned The Dispossessed up front because as soon as it was revealed that Prospect VII was a colony world, I got serious Dispossessed vibes as well. So it's like, what if Omelas but Dispossessed but Star Trek?
I love that you brought up how it’s a classic utilitarian thought experiment. Many writers have used it as a jumping off point. That said, a story credit, or at least a special thanks, for LeGuin would’ve been nice to see. The very end had me cackling as well, Gene absolutely loved plagiarising (but not Gene L Coon!)
I think that U. K. LeGuin, a titan of science fiction and moral visionary, would welcome this episode disseminating her vital message to a new audience. The SNW episode was very well done, took up Leguin's motif and ran away with it with excellent results. I only wish U.K. LeGuin had lived long enough to write a story about the society the ones who walk away from Omelas had built... now that would be a challenge! Thanks for a great segment and the U.K. LeGuin appreciation, Steve!
Ursula Le Guin is one of my very favourite authors so this episode suffered a bit in my estimation from that. In a "Le Guin did it better!" Kinda way. I still think that, but after a rewatch I did like the episode a bit more. There's a lot it does well. Making the kid a central character we get to know and sympathise with is an obvious choice in expanding the premise and building a narrative. The story the Majalans tell themselves, that the First Servant makes a willing sacrifice for the rest of them that they must honour & be grateful for, doesn't hold up to scrutiny when you consider that the First Servant is chosen at birth & raised his whole life for this. How can that be a real choice? I wouldn't put it among the best of the season but Strange New Worlds set such a high average that it's still a pretty great episode.
I was in a production of Omelas in Portland OR. back in the 80s. Got to meet Le Guin a few times. She was a pleasant and gracious lady. In retrospect I don't think the production was that successful because too much had to be explained to the audience. But it was fun. Oh and Dovstoevsky.
I've heard of that story before. What troubled me more was the pilot, which basically reprised "The Day the Earth Stood Still" with the Enterprise crew as the aliens (Klattu). No, there wasn't any Gort, but it's still similar. And foreshadowing this by having Pike watch the old movie doesn't make it more acceptable.
Stretching a 7 page short story to one hour of TV without introducing any more content may seem like an impossible task, but if anyone could, it's the writers for Star Trek Picard.
Ursula based her story off of Dostoyevsky's work... so really you cannot say they ripped her off. This is a clickbaity sort of title. LeGuin is quoted as saying: ""The central idea of this psychomyth, the scapegoat", writes Le Guin, "turns up in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov, and several people have asked me, rather suspiciously, why I gave the credit to William James. The fact is, I haven't been able to re-read Dostoyevsky, much as I loved him, since I was twenty-five, and I'd simply forgotten he used the idea. But when I met it in James' 'The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life', it was with a shock of recognition." Let's not bring capitalist notions of ripping people off into art, all writers are inspired by their idols and LeGuin is a figure with a HUGE shadow.
There's also been criticisms of the character of Una ripping off DC Fontana as well (at least not attributing back to her) and of course, going back to the days of Voyager, "Blink of an Eye" ripping off "Dragon's Egg," and I think the differences are enough (well, I think the episode "Ghosts of Ilyria" should have added a note at the end "In Memory of DC Fontant" myself, but that's just my opinion). We can also look at many pop culture movies, etc. and their similarities such as Woody Allen's "Blue Jasmine" which is obviously at least a homage to Tennessee Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." As someone who has taken Master courses in Post Modern Literature, common syncretic allegories and references and sources to find and discover are very, very common nowadays than ever before (back in the day it was more truly public domain to the bible, legends, myths, fairy tales, etc.). While I have a few issues with this episode, it's not "oh my, ripping off Ursual Le Guin." Actually, the 9th episode may have even more callbacks to the Alien/Ripley universe, but again, this is a common trend in postmodern storytelling. As always when it is truly plagiarism, etc. but none of the examples I just mentioned do that. Mollie and the Old Man UA-camrs may always complain about this, but I understand enough what's going on. It's more who does it better when they do this, of course. :)
Only “Omelas” isn’t properly a story at all, but more a parable, or thought experiment, or mediation, on the way we live our lives; as opposed, perhaps, to the way we should be living them. As such, the SNW episode, which for better or worse IS an actual story, cannot be said to be a ripoff. I’m more interested in the question of what LeGuin, who I was privileged to meet some years ago, would have thought of it as art. As a world-famous genre author who liked Trek (she wrote an appreciation of TNG for TV Guide as it was ending its run), I suspect that she would have enjoyed it, but who knows?
I love that people get into a craze about this stuff. Last week I saw a review of the Enterprise episode 'Dawn' and how many say it's a rip off of Enemy Mine. And if that's true and this episode is a rip off Le Guin too, then the first Star Trek pilot is a rip off of Forgotten Planet! This isn't the critique that people think it is. It's just how writing works.
Sacrificing a child so the greater whole can thrive is common fixture in many stories, Steinbeck's; The Pearl, the Saint George myth, lots mythology and even history built around child sacrifice.
It's a very good point that, while the story obviously takes inspiration from Le Guin, nothing is wholly original. Inspiration is a chain that goes back forever. Also, while the SNW story does put Pike in a position where he has to make the moral decision form the short story, it also has other things to teach him that aren't in Le Guin. Lessons like there are some things worse than his apparent fate, and also, in the context of that fate, that there are things he can't control, that he can't fix.
Yup. Take away Romeo and Juliet, and a mountain of modern romance literature crumbles. The concept of an innocent reluctant suffering savior that redeems a world from its sins is also a common theme. When an author asks a question and another author answers the question, it isn’t a rip off. The questions are not rhetorical. The original author wants us to explore. I am reminded of a saying that says, every modern situation comedy is a rewrite of I Love Lucy episodes. As an artist I am acutely aware of IP rights. But somewhere between homage, satire, and parody an answer is born that lives in an unique point of view. Not one that copies the original but one that carries the original idea forward.
I have loved Le Guin's writing for many years. Along with the people Le Guin credits for her inspiration there is another short story with a the germ of the idea in it. Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery".
This also reminds me of the real life child goddesses of Nepal, the Kumari. While they don't necessarily suffer, they also aren't given a choice, and as soon as they hit puberty, they are no longer considered devine and have to figure out how to live like normal people after having been worshipped their whole lives.
Maybe it's not as well known, but I'm always a little surprised that "Duet" didn't offer any credit to the author of "The Man in the Glass Booth" about a Jewish businessman captured and put on trial for being a N*zi war criminal. Definitely a case of inspiration rather than ripoff, but it still would have been nice to see the credit offered, all the same.
I think my favorite take on the tale of Omelas is The Scholomance series by Naomi Novik, because (scholomance spoilers below) It features the daughter of one who walked away from an Omelas grabbing a metaphorical gun in one hand and metaphorical brick and mortar in the other, and walking ominously back in.
Omelas always reminds me of the Gadsden flag, commonly seen flying from the houses in my area. "Don't tread on me," it reads. But being familiar with the people who live in those houses, I sadly know to add the parenthetical "go tread on that neighborhood I wouldn't dream of living in instead."
I saw the video title and automatically knew which TNG episode he was referring to. Time for me to finish reading the Hainish cycle. Seriously, at the very least, read *The Left Hand of Darkness* .
@@Krolose_hill the use of the world "pervert" for a member of their race expressing only one gender made me think it was a deliberate reference. In each case, the story itself was less important than the exploration of humanity and gender.
If a show were created to examine the everyday life in the Federation, Le Quin is one of the few people who I think could've done it justice. Most writers only add more technology to their everyday life and leave it at that. No real thought about how motivations and experiences might change in a different milieu with different adaptation structures
Despite having a crush on Lindy Booth since Jett Jackson, I think I must've fallen asleep before this episode ended, because I can't recall that horrible ending (my despairing wife would sometimes not wake me, and in my torpor, and due to not being entirely sold on the series, I guess I didn't go back for a recap). That reminds me of the denouement of Torchwood's Children Of Men, though, which may also owe something to Omelas.
Personally I think the safest and most respectful thing to do would have been to give Le Guin co-author credit. Yes there are sub-plots, characterisation and general fleshing out and the episode writers certainly did enough to justify their own credits but the core of the story comes from Le Guin's work, the rest is decoration rather than any new twist on the idea so I'd say this goes beyond mere "inspiration". As for the legal precedents, you get all kinds of odd judgements in plagiarism cases (the world of popular music is full of them). Maybe it depends on how well known you think the Le Guin story is (Steve suggests very - I'm not sure). I was familiar enough to recognise that this was a retelling without having actually read the original but I have no idea how typical that is of the audience in general.
"Who Actually is Captain Sisko's Greatest Nemesis?" I feel like everyone will say Dukat or Winn, but IMHO it's himself. Ben fighting against the will of the Prophets and his sacrificing his Starfleet ethics? Ben Sisko is his own worst enemy.
For a relatively quick, easy, and rewarding introduction to Le Guin, I highly recommend The Lathe of Heaven. I take it as a deceptively simple-seeming play on the fairy tale of the fisherman's wife, and having read it I have found myself reflecting back on it often over the years. They've tried to adapt it a couple of times, but the very first one by PBS, starring a young Bruce Davison as George Orr, probably remains the best.
I consider The Lathe of Heaven the best. I saw the original airing on PBS that they changed afterward because it featured the Beatles music without their permission. I feel like I stand alone, it's part of my DNA now, and nobody knows what I'm talking about.
Mark Twainsaid: "There is no such thing as an original idea." He argues we can turn old ideas into new, curious combinations, but he reckoned they are “the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.”
@@JAMESLEVEE I think the idea of that episode was more about class disparity which is relevant and certainly a way to read this story, where I feel that here it's more specifically about whether the needs of the many justify the sacrifice of a unconsenting few.
Ursula K Le Guin also wrote The Lathe of Heaven. She was a professor at Portland State University and a wonderful conversationalist. We really miss her. ua-cam.com/video/M8VRbaVNvSA/v-deo.html
Creators take inspiration from other creators all the time. I read a great book called "Benchley" written by Preston that took inspiration from Jaws. That said, it wasn't another Jaws remake. It took the writer of Jaws, Peter Benchley, and put him into a situation that would eventually inspire his writing of the classic story of Jaws. It is a fairly new book and is only now gaining traction, but it would not exist without the writing of Peter Benchley. Is that stealing? After reading Preston's original work, I would say absolutely not. If anything, it corrects some issues created by Bencley's Jaws in terms of blaming a force of nature for perceived intentional acts. Thanks for this video, Steve. It really opens up a discussion about new stories and where they come from.
That episode was very hard for me to get through... I hope, that I'd be one of the people to leave the city. I just don't believe I could live a life of joy, while an innocent child suffers !!!! It would eat my soul up...
I think any beef with the episode isn't that it was done, but the degree to which the original Le Guin story was or wasn't listed in the credits, based on specific story points that elevate the subject from philosophical musings to a specific expression of the idea. For instance, the TOS episode Arena has basically an adaptation of an earlier story, and was credited as such, even though the Trekness of it made it distinct from the original story. Drawing inspiration from the specific Le Guin story without crediting it, and then falling back on justifying it by saying it was drawing upon the same themes she did and just a coincidence, or that it's OK to rip her off because she was drawing upon earlier works (which still begs the question of the degree to which the writers of the specific episode were aware of what influenced Le Guin) seems like a deception.
It's not like either story is original in its premise. There have been many instances of civilisations thought history that sacrificed a child at periodic intervals to continue the prosperity of their societies.
I know of two other Trek episodes that have "riped off" a great work of SF. The first is the TOS episode Arena, which is remarkably similar to a 1944 short story by Fredric Brow also titled Arena. The other is the Voyager episode Blink of an Eye, which has striking similarities with the 1980 novel Dragon's Egg, by Robert L. Forward. The first rip off was unintentional, the writer independantly came up with the same idea, the similarities were noticed soon before filming the episode was to begin, the production team reached out to Brown who was happy to let the episode be made in exchange for a mention of his name and story in the credits, which was done. The other, well, nobody knows for sure, except for those directly involved, because nobody ever made a statement, official or otherwise, about it. Both work of literature are outstanding in their own right, I strongly recommend you look them up.
I read LeGuin’s story as a teen and thought it was an analogy for Israel and Palestine. I had just read Le Carre’s Little Drummer Girl, so that might have nfluenced me.
The setting is somewhat reminiscent of The Dispossessed as well - the Terans showing up as conflict explodes between the twin worlds, one luxurious and the other austere. Thank you for mentioning The Brothers Karamazov and William James. wonderful stuff.
Le Guin has long been influential in the most thought-provoking examples of sci-fi on the screen. Star Trek: The Next Generation’s episode ‘The Chase’ centres around the crew’s discovery of fragmentary DNA evidence that all humanoid species are descended from a single species, who ‘planted’ their DNA throughout the galaxy. This concept is the same as Ursula Le Guin’s ‘Hainish Cycle’ of novels and stories, which comprises the majority of her science fiction genre writing. Avatar was partly inspired by (i.e.ripped off) Ursula Le Guin’s ‘The Word for World is Forest’, a haunting novel featuring humans trying to mine (i.e destroy) a planet populated by humanoids living in and having a psychic connection with the forest.
Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness is one of my favorite books, I let a few years pass before I go back and read the book again. Her style, her worlds are unique in the SciFi genre.
Once (back in the pre 'net days of BBSes) someone asked "What would you do if the couple in the apartment above yours had a *really noisy* bed?" Somebody answered "I'd just oil the bed." "That's silly," I thought. "It's not your bed -- You'd be interrupting the couple upstairs." Then, I let my imagination wander and wrote a short story (4-5 pages, I guess) about how that interaction would work -- complete with inside jokes and transporting characters from the community into the story. My story won an award for the best post of the year, even thought *everybody **_also_** knew about the interaction that it was sourced from.* In fact, the fact that everybody knew about the source of the premise of the story probably made it that much more interesting. You could probably start with the premise of "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas and create *dozens* of stories -- each one being quite distinct from all the others.
I admit to -- while watching the episode -- turning to my wife and saying "This reminds me of an Ursula K LeGuin story". I'm glad I wasn't the only one. 😀
Sorry to burst your balloon, but I was in a discussion of this moral dilemma in my freshman philosophy class several years before Ursula LeGuin's "Omelas" story was published. But thank you for bringing the question up, because the suggestion of this theme being a rip-off of another story presented during Holy Week, has answered a question which has puzzled me for quite a while. How the freak did Luke, who was the only Gospel writer NOT present in the Garden of Gethsemane, know the details of Jesus' prayer? The disciples who WERE there were all zonked out!?! I conjecture that this same philosophical exercise about whether it is ethical to make even a single innocent suffer for the sake of all, caused St. Luke to conjecture verses 42-44 of his 22d chapter. But then calling "The only way this could be ethical is for the Suffering Servant to be a volunteer who knows what [s]he is in for." the Gesthemane Criterion, makes for a logical time-loop over two millennia long ... a new Star Trek record!!! Awesome 😎 , gang!
The video claims the basic moral dilemma is not original, you are not bursting the bubble of anyone who actually watched the thing through. In this video there is a verbatim quote from William James from 1891 that details the basic premise of the story (what if a society existed where the permanent happiness of millions depended on the suffering of one person on the outside). And it is mentioned that LeGuin's subtitled the story "Variations on a theme by William James." Also she admitted some inspiration from Dostoyevsky.
27:30 actually I interviewed Bill Wolcoff on my channel and he said that it was directly the intention to use LeGuin as the basis for the episode
Well, that settles that!
Jessie just swans in, shoots Steve down, then vanishes into the night.
@@AndrewD8Red Well since this is a Trek video, wouldn't it be uncloak then cloak :)
There were comments on reviews soon after the episode was released saying it was based on a script that predated publication of Omelas; I guess that wasn't the case
@@cryptking6283
Did you just "um, actually" my response to Jessie's "um, actually?!"
As Jon Dorsey says; what unmitigated gall!
For me the most heartbreaking line in LeGuin’s story also marks an important difference from the SNW episode: “Please let me out, I’ll be good.” Because it implies that (unlike the First Servant) the child in Omelas *does not understand* what is being done to them, and is denied even whatever consolation might come from knowing the purpose their suffering serves. The Omelas child appears to think they are enduring a punishment because they were bad in some way, and might someday be released if they promise to be good, which the reader knows will never happen. That’s the line that punches me in the gut hardest whenever I read the story.
It's reminiscent of that nasty story about the daughter of Sejanus which you can find in Tacitus.
I think one important difference between the two stories is that in “The Ones Who Walk Away From Oomlas”, it seems to me that it is implied that the people are doing this for their own comfort. They seem to do this because rather than share their burdens and suffering, they choose to put all their suffering on one person.
In the Star Trek story their very survival depends on this child’s sacrifice. A city falling is pretty catastrophic very few people (if any) will survive.
Oh _ugh,_ that just _hurts._
@@scribblingjoe The argument that their survival depends on the sacrifice only holds up if you assume that it's impossible to evacuate a city, even given centuries in which to do it. Sure, in the short term of needing a replacement battery to slot into the torture chair, the choice is sacrifice the child or plummet to death, but the day after the ascension ceremony, they could work on any of a number of solutions that would sacrifice their utopian comfort but not threaten their lives.
That’s a really wonderful point. My heartbreak, especially given the nature of the world we’re living in, comes with this: “They know the child is there, all the people of Omelas. They know that it has to be there.” And, of course, the sentence that serves both as the story’s title and conclusion, that has and will continue to haunt me for the rest of my life.
I swear, you'd think Starfleet would have a form for potential host planets to fill out before a ship visits them.
"Do you certify that you're civilization is not powered by the continuous suffering of one (or several) small child?"
"Do you certify that any member of our crew will not be executed if they accidentally break a window while playing football?" etc.
Yeah, how many times now have Federation vessels e countered seeming utopias, then it turns out its because htey eat puppies or something.
Also, isn't the Federation mean tot be a utopia? That bit always puzzled, me, when the Enetprise show sup and Data or whomever goes "the society of bumfluff 7 has no war or crime or poverty", why doesn't picard say "Oh, you mean like us? but we also have replicators"m "yeah, you're right, what a s**t hole!"
Does your civilisation worship a computer?
- This [pic i] is a computer, does it look like your god?
Or put on trial for walking on grass
Does your population walk around half naked?
( If yes, the ship’s CMO should ensure all landing parties are properly vaccinated against known STDs)
@@standardnerd9840 The ship's Chief First-contact Officer will presumably also remind all landing party personnel about the nature of informed consent. Walking around half-naked (from the perspective of an outsider) is not an excuse for sexual assault by the outsider. Also, landing party personnel should be reminded on how to avoid transmitting anything they are carrying to the natives, who have no conception of extraterrestrial venereal diseases (reference to what happened when Polynesian natives met horny, syphilis- and gonorrhea-infected European sailors.)
The moment they first dropped the word "Ascension" I was like "Ohhhhh, they're _totally_ puttin' that kid in a murder machine..." 😅
A voice in my head started screaming "Sanctuary! Sanctuary!" as Omelas, Logan's Run, Strange New Worlds, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame all melted together.
Yup. My thinking was, "Ascension -> apotheosis -> becoming a god. And only the dead become gods."
But the boy in Omelas and the First Servant in Star Trek don't get murdered. They might wish at times that they were. Their fate is worse than death -- they're both going to suffer for as long as they can keep him alive.
That Ursula Le Guin story is way more heartbreaking, haven't stopped thinking about it all day. I suppose Star Trek didn't want to go that dark even though the acting on that kid having one moment of fear just before he gets connected was also horrific.
I did catch up with the short story after reading about the similarities between it and this SNW episode. In agree with you that this is a case of inspiration rather than adaptation. Indeed, when I first saw this episode, I was reminded of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," wherein a small town regularly has a lottery, the "winner" of which is stoned to death, for reasons lost to collective memory but enshrined in tradition. If the lottery were not held, if the child in Omalas were freed, it the First Servant were not connected to the machine, would their communities still thrive? Perhaps, but no one seems to have the courage to find out.
I'm surprised no one has brought up Spock's "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one".
I was thinking that myself.🤔
It would be interesting to question Spock about what he thought of the situation from an ethical pov.
Of course there's the obvious evasion that it was bad from a practical pov.
But in that case, Spock was making the choice to sacrifice himself for the lives of his shipmates. It could be argued that the First Servant in the SNW episode was too young to make that choice for himself.
America was founded upon the principle of protecting the individual's rights ( to equality ) from the potential happiness of the few..........
How very far......... we have strayed
That was actually Spock quoting John Stuart Mill on the subject of Utilitarianism, which promotes the value of the greatest good for the greatest number of people. It was brought up on another thread in connection with a criticism of “Omelas” made by author N. K. Jemison and others: that those who didn’t approve of the arrangement should have freed the child instead of merely walking away. Which objection, to my mind, totally misreads the point that Le Guin was making - the citizens of Omelas *aren’t* bad people deliberately perpetrating an unjust system. They are, in fact, sensitive to the child’s suffering, and deeply regret it, but have made the moral calculus that any alternative, in terms of overall suffering, would be worse. That’s actually a defensible argument, and one used every day in our world to justify far greater cruelty than that visited upon a single child, and to far less benefit. This is what Le Guin referred to as “the American dilemma” in the story’s introduction, and it gets more pertinent to our own situation with every passing day.
You’d be hard pushed to find a sci-fi writer who hasn’t been strongly inspired by LeGuin.
You'd be hard pressed to find a writer in the information age with something akin to an original thought. Stealing isn't the same as being inspired. Maybe I'm just too much of a media hound, when I see 1950s western episodes being redone in Star Trek and then find out the Westerns were derivative from pulp dramas in the 1920s, and those were from plays in the 1800s, and on and on. As one wise man once said a long time ago "There is nothing new under the sun."
You'd need to take books and stories written BEFORE LeGuin wrote most of her work.
What about all the sci-fi which came before she was published?
Or Poul Anderson (Hugo Award x7, Nebula Award x3).
Any movie, show, or story about an organization that governs or attempts to regulate time travel are all copying Poul Anderson's "Time Patrol" stories, the first of which was published in 1955.
Department of Temporal Affairs: Star Trek
"Time Cop" (1994)
"El ministerio del tiempo" (2015-2020)
"Time Cop" comic (1992)
The Temps Commission: The Umbrella Academy
The Federal Time Bureau: Legends of Tomorrow
Time Agency, Time Lords (Dr. Who)
and countless other treatments of the concept pioneered by Anderson.
The Great age of science fiction, really came in each generation of new writers. But the Giants like Philip k dick, Frederick Brown, Ursula LeGuin, in many others that we don't normally talk about, as well as the ones that we always talk about like Asimov, Arthur c Clarke... The fact is we've had fantastic writers in each generation and sci-fi has been the great exploration... Not of the fantastic worlds, but of the human frailties, flaws, virtues... Ursula was probably the best of them all. Her writing is deep in ways that only the absolute masters of all time have ever managed. And that's saying a lot because we had many and still do in science fiction writing, I'm perfectly okay with stories being repeated in new interesting ways
Le Guin's Omelas story is the kind of thing meant for a Star Trek episode which makes episodes and societies based entirely on thought experiments all the time. Surprised there wasn't a ToS or TNG episode that does this.
TOS "The Cloud Minders" touches on this. Floating City powered by ore dug by downtrodden miner class. It's a bit tangent to Omelas, but still you can draw comparisons.
@@mikebauer9948Except for not being 1/1000th as good. Execution is everything.
Possibly.
But when "borrowing" whole cloth from a weaver, the weaver deserves credit.
And in this instance, the multi-million dollar behemoth that is Star Trek, REFUSED to give ANY credit to Le Guin...
Le Guin is an amazing author. I definitely recommend the Earth Sea series and the Hainish Cycle, as well as the novel The Left Hand of Darkness.
In the Earthsea books, we learn that the word for rock (like, what the earth is made of) in True Speech is tolk and that for the sea is inien. Make of that what you will.
The Lathe of Heaven.
@@stripeytawney822 YES! I LOVE that story AND the original movie of that book.
@@pillmuncher67 Because AS it is stated in Earth-Sea... "To know the name of something is to RULE the thing!" That's why no one used their REAL Name in public... to keep from being controlled. Like in the Earth-Sea pre-qual short story about "Mr. Underhill" because he lived under a hill...
But no one knew that he was REALLY a Dragon in disguise!
Several lifetimes ago when I was doing my undergrad degree, I took a course titled, "Science Fiction As Literature." TLHoD occupied about half the entire semester and it was like an endless onion -- layer upon layer upon layer. I don't think we ever got all the way down to the bottom because we had other books the prof insisted we had to cover in class, but... wow.
One important question is: did James Cameron rip off Ursula Le Guin's story, The Word For World Is Forest, when making Avatar, and the answer to that is...100% yes.
Wasn’t it a copy of Dances With Wolves? Cameron even admitted that it was Dances With Wolves In Space.
AND Heinlein. (Everyone forgets that one!)
"I see you"?
Came from the lesser-known (but still masterful) Heinlein novel, "Double Star."
Cameron appears to be a f**king magpie -- he'll snatch up any bright, shiny object and just squirrel it away til he can find a use for it.
"Genre fiction, as Terry Pratchett has pointed out, is a stew. You take stuff out of the pot, you put stuff back. The stew bubbles on.”
― Neil Gaiman
Have you read any Discworld? The first two books are a constant riff off of Tolkien, Fritz Leiber, McCaffrey, Mervyn Peake, Lovecraft, Poe..... No dedications whatsoever.
Later it got a bit less easy riffing and more substantial social satire (A LeGuin influence!!!) but pTerry never stopped satirising fantasy and SF tropes. LeGuin (who he knew personally) he totally ransacked for ideas and tropes.
The development of how pTerry treats gender in the Dwarven community is a playful turnaround of the Left Hand of Darkness, 100% taken from Ursula. (And a reason Discworld and Potterheads don't mix that well anymore :/ )
Go have a look at the brilliant Lspace Annotated Pratchett File :D
And Pratchett and Gaiman? They were some kind of hive mind :D and constantly used each others ideas. I have met them both, but never saw them together.......
I think we all resonate with the “Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach” and “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” stories is they reflect, indirectly, the way our current society is set up.
He who shall not be named referred to the US as the “shining city upon a hill” much like the floating cities in the Star Trek episode, but what children are suffering to support our lifestyle in this shining city?
Have an EV car? Some of the minerals used to create the batteries for EVs have major issues with child labor when mined. Don’t have an EV? What about a smartphone? The same minerals are used in batteries for smartphones. This is just one example of an industry with child labor issues. There are many others both known and suspected.
As I write this, Republicans are trying to roll back child labor laws that have protected children in the US for over a century.
If you live in the developed world, especially if you live in the US, these suffering children should be on your mind everyday, but who among us would be willing to walk away from Omelas?
Good point. Also, it’s easier to save one child who everyone knows the location of - than hundreds of thousands unknown and far away. Our ‘cities of eternal summer’ provide less paradise but have dug the system that supports it far deeper.
I am glad that you shared this. But there is so much more. Ursula Le Guin said that she rewrote the story of Khronos, changing the old man who was entrapped by the Watchers with a child because it tugged at the heartstrings more strongly. 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas', William James's 'The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life', as well as Fourier, Bellamy, Morris, Wells, and Dostoyevsky, among many others have reworked the Khronos/Cronos story of the sleeper to comment on current culture. It is a story as timeless as the Suffering Servant. Do haters desire to trash all of the great ancient works and ban them from modern interpretations on the immutable conditions of being? I applaud all of these authors.
Left Hand of Darkness & The Lathe of Heaven are works by Leguin that are still very memorable for me. The Wizaed of Earthsea is sketchier in my mind for some reason. The Left Hand of Darkness definitely expanded my mind regarding gender binaries & gender roles some 40 odd years ago. It's amazing how relevant that novel is to current events considering when it was written.
Good call! I feel exactly the same way.
Glad you mentioned James at the end. The whole concept originates in criticisms of moral consequentialism and anyone familiar with the arguments could easily wrap a setting around such thought experiments; crafting a plot and characters is the part that makes the episode good
I feel like a tribute or inspiration is perfectly acceptable, I mean otherwise nobody is allowed to re-interpret works
But is it acknowledged?
@@jayanderson9375 Does it need to be? At some point whatever you did just becomes part of the genre. You can’t really get mad at somebody from taking ideas from a book that was written multiple decades ago probably
@@Kalmera6238 There are no legal ways to enforce that. 99.99% of modern writing is inspired by someone else's work. Christopher Paolini was inspired by JRRTolken, and yes he admits this in interviews but not in his books. George RR Martin is even inspired by others. So was Robert Jordan and lots of other artists. Some admit this, some don't. I say, if it is not breaking actual laws, why should this be a problem? I think this video is about getting views, and creating drama where none should exist. :(
Never knew about this before I saw the episode, but I had just re-read a compendium of Le Guin's short stories, _"The Wind's Twelve Quarters"_ a few weeks earlier and so it didn't take me long to realize that the story was very reminiscent of _"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"_ . This wouldn't even be the first time one of Le Guin's stories inspired Trek - her Hanish series novel _"The Left Hand of Darkness"_ was a direct inspiration for the Next Generation 5th season episode _"The Outcast"_ and from that series her _"Law of Cultural Embargo”_ is pretty much the root inspiration for the Federation's General Order 1: The Prime Directive.
Ursula K. Le Guin, my favourite anarchist author.
One of the things I missed in Voyager and some of DS9 and TNG (and of course ENT) was the "poetry titles" that TOS and TAS used. I haven't caught SNW yet, but I am pleased to see that tradition is back!
I've been trying to get my partner into Trek for a year, and strange new worlds is where it finally stuck.
We're both neurodivergent.
Her reaction to this episode was really something - she hated on Pike for trying to save the kid. "How dare he not respect her culture! He's supposed to be enlightened!" I know her reaction will be well in the minority, but I love that nutrek spawned a series so well written that we can talk philosophy over each episode.
Starship Captains, like paramedics/er staff, should never say "it'll be/it's been quiet/slow/uneventfull." That's a sure fire way for things to get set off into a massive hellscape of chaos. Now, I would be inclined to say that the episode feels more like a homage to Le Quin's story Those Who Walk Away. Even if the writers of Star Trek SNW had taken the story beat for beat, the perspective is vastly different. In the Those Who Walk Away, we are given the information from a resident of Omelas, whereas in the episode our perspective is that of the crew of the Enterprise. I don't know, that's just how I see it.
I think this episode is honestly one of the stories that shows a weakness in SNW. They spend the entire episode building up to the dramatic reveal (that pretty much anyone could guess long before it's revealed), and basically no time examining it and what it really means to the society. No time discussing how the society might try to extricate itself from this situation and the reasons why they haven't. It's a huge missed opportunity.
In fact, it's so focused on drama, that "Tots Drama" must be the 4th pillar of their society, because there's no reason for them to show the ceremony to Pike and act like they'd have no idea how he'd react. They've spent the entire damn episode hiding what's going on exactly because they know the reaction will be bad.
I think this is the wrong way to look at it. On some level, the story is not about the society powered by the forsaken child; it's about how *Pike* reacts to learning about the society powered by the forsaken child. He has lots of reasons to look at this situation and accept the bargain they made; the city is beautiful, Elora is beautiful and (seemingly) kind, their medical technology offers him an escape from the sacrifice he knows he must make. And yet, even with all that, he can't shut down the voice telling him that this child's suffering is *wrong* once he pieces it together.
Just because the audience can figure this out before Pike does is no bad thing. Dramatic irony like this is also a way to heighten tension and provide a sense of looming dread, which is what this story does.
@@pjlusk7774 except we basically have no time to see his reaction or how he deals with it, because it's the very end of the episode instead of taking real time in the episode for him to demonstrate how he feels and reacts. All there is is shock value even in his reaction. There's just not much substance to that. And it isn't like his reaction tells us anything meaningful about his character or anything else. In fact, it's pretty much the same reaction you'd expect from anyone.
All I want is for them to put some work into thoughtful sci-fi, and this fell short quite a bit.
Bingo. That is one of the reasons I am not a fan of this show. The characters do stupid things. They hide a daughter in need of medical treatment instead of actively searching for a way to get the treatment needed. They sleep with an old flame without establishing anything remotely interesting about her. And do not get me started on the whole knowlege of the future thing.
The more active role of the Ones Who Walk Away in the Trek episode is important to me, because it's what always bothered me about the original story. It never sat with me that they just left, instead of actively trying to do something to help the imprisoned child.
Those are "The ones who got a bullet in the back of their heads", and it is a less poetic story.
This is something I thought and thought about as a kid when I first read the story, how could they not see how terrible it is? Why don't they try to save the child?
And at least for me, I came to think of those that walk away as damaged by their 'perfect' society. so damaged by their culture that they won't try to help the child, that their only thought is to escape for themselves. And it has sat with me, that maybe how you are raised or the society that created you might have such a large effect on you that your morals, your sense of right and wrong becomes twisted. And I think this shows that the child bares the brunt of the abuse, many who see or know about the child are abused on their own way lesser surely, but still abused.
You might take a look at N. K. Jemison's "The Ones Who Stay and Fight" - a direct response in that vein to Omelas
Agreed. The Ones Who Walk Away have done nothing but absolve themselves of the mess. I think Niemoller would have some words for them.
The ability to successfully fight for the child implies the ability to break the laws of Omelas, in which case it contradicts the premise that the abuse of the child make the society perfect including presumably perfectly free of crime. Whether such perfection is even coherently imaginable is a hard one.
The premise is kind of tricky to make coherent and by giving it mechanics the Star Trek episode makes it possible to imagine ways around the bizarre iron-clad arrangement posited, whether fighting to free the child or creating some non-child torturing technological alternative.
Edit: So I went and read the story, Omelas may or not be free of crime (and may or may not have laws) but it is "free of guilt" and letting the child run free would is explicitly described as introducing "guilt" into the city. So the story does indeed premise the impossibility of anyone freeing the child.
Getting inspiration is never a bad thing. Ursula paid tributes in her own work.
If the writers of SNW had straight up taken the story word for word and used it as their own, which would have been very hard for the reasons you identified, then there would have been an issue.
A credit in the episode would have been nice though.
There's a more on the nose version of this story from Doctor Who, wherein the futuristic city of London is flying through space on the back of an enslaved space whale and the population votes to either keep it enslaved or set it free. And every time they vote to keep it, then erase their memories so they can sleep soundly.
In that version the children going missing aren't the ones being imprisoned, they are the ones aware of the horrible truth.
Other than the memory thing, and the surprise twist that the missing children weren't the ghastly secret the major difference is that they eventually choose to stop torturing the animal and it turns out that it's far more willing to help by going faster when it's not tortured. I think like many Who stories it's a bit overwrought and lacks subtlety. But the influence is there.
@Oasus It is possible to adapt classic stories into the Star Trek universe. Back in the 70s, the animated Star Trek series adapted Larry Niven's Known Space story, "The Soft Weapon" into a Star Trek episode. They kept Niven's Kzinti (humanoid feline aliens), but substituted Spock for the Puppeteer Nessus. They also credited Niven.
@@photoboyjet Well... Larry adapted his own story, which is why he is credited as the writer. He was friends with DC Fontana, who talked him into providing a story.
I saw LeVar Burton read a short story live here in Portland about 5 years ago. That short story was by Ursula K Le Guin.
That is all.
What about in Salem, O? ; )
And that is more than enough 🖤
I’d love to see / hear that!
I did not know about Le Guin, so upon seeing the episode, I mostly thought of parallels to "The Lottery" by Shirley Jacskson. Your summary did not indicate how the child is chosen in Le Guin story and I quick search on the web did not seem to yield an answer. So maybe it is left ambiguous. But in the Trek episode it is absolutely a lottery. Also, I do not recall the episode giving an explanation as to why another child can't just be plugged into the machine if something happened to the lottery "winner". The implication seems to be that physically any child will make the machine run. But that the system that keeps the public willing to accept the suffering of the child is very delicate and requires the ritualism to keep going. Where it not for the established traditions the city has built around the rituals, more people could start to object and bring the society down. So even in an emergency, where the first servant is replaced last minute due to a kidnapping or assassination, any deviation could devastate the system they have worked out.
I think (?) it is explicit in the episode that the First Servant has received a bunch of implants and other adjustments over a period of months or years (since birth?) to prepare to be plugged into the machine. So if the child is not available to be plugged in they can't just grab another random child. Although if my entire civilization depended for its existence I'd probably prepare a couple of spare potential first servants in the wings in case something happened to the primary one. So yeah the lack of spares is probably a sign of the complex dance of ritual and lottery.
@@allanolley4874 I'd have to watch it again (only seen once). But I remember the preparation to be more like pampering with the best education and toys and care (fattening a pig for slaughter) and brainwashing, since the ritual involves getting the kid to answer a question to indicate they agree to get hooked up to the machine. Although the one kid doesn't give an answer and his face says he was not really committed to sparkle motion. So the consent is ultimately sought but not needed. The implants that I remember were something that I thought everyone in the city had to regulate their health.
You should read it! It’s free online if you search for it and is super short
@@allanolley4874
There is no doubt that Majalan civilization was highly fragile.
Cities floating in the sky are more cool than practical.
For me, I believe Omelas did inspire the episode, but I feel there is a fundamental point of difference in the two that changes the entire dynamic of the premise, which I feel most people are ignoring. The Enterprise Crew. They are outsiders who are there to function as Judge, Police, Executioners. Le Guin's story is about the natives of Omelas and the reader judging the morality of the situation. The Star Trek episode is about the Enterprise Crew & the writers judging the morality of the situation.
I do agree that "rip-off" or other such terms go too far. But this really does raise the question, "How close is too close to no longer only be 'inspired by' a previous work?" It may be a semantics thing mostly, but it does have legitimate repercussions insofar as things like crediting and citing previous creators and remuneration and compensation for the use of that work.
I don't know where that line lies. It's a tricky situation, only compounded by all the times that big companies do this very thing to be able to "use" a work without paying for the "rights" to use the work.
The Original Series ripped off Robert Heinlein's Puppet Masters novel in the episode where flying creatures would attach themselves on the backs of humans and control them. Kirk's brother was in this episode and died due to these creatures.
It can be argued that "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky" kinda-sorta ripped off Heinlein's "Orphans of the Sky" as well.
@@emsleywyatt3400 The Brain Eaters is itself an uncredited adaption of Puppet Masters though. Puppet Masters is patient zero for this trope
@@willmfrank I think the old TV series, "The Starlost" from Harlan Ellison is more closely conforming to "Orphans of the Sky" than "FTWIHAIHTTS." Interesting that it ("Starlost") was made without anyone going after Ellison, but the producers of "The Terminator" settled Ellison's suit accusing them that they ripped off his "Outer Limits" story, "The Soldier," which I think was even more distantly related to Terminator than anything described here, and itself could be said to be descended from H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" for out-of-time travellers who sacrifice their presents for a better futures. Heinlein himself, in his stories, sometimes made this "borrowing" explicit with characters saying variants of, "writers just file the serial numbers off an old story and submit it as new."
Omelas spelled backwards is Salemo, which is of course very close to Salem (of witch trials fame). Yet it's semitic root means "peace", as the Arabic "salaam" and Hebrew "shalom" show.
That was also the root of King Solomon's name, the wisest king in the Bible. The Bible tells the story of how Solomon decided the case of two women who came to him, both claiming to be the mother of the same infant boy.
In order to reveal by their reactions which one loved the boy most (and thus presumably was the real mother), he acted as though he'd decided to kill the baby, but then awarded him to the woman who was willing to do whatever it took to save him.
So, perhaps Le Guin played on the double-edged sword of the historical and religious connotations of the word Salem, while also invoking a kind of reverse symmetry that invites us to see ourselves as in a mirror.
Or then again, maybe my weird penchant for spelling things backwards is running away with me...
Didn't they also do this in the new millennium Doctor Who? The floating city of London on the back of a Leviathan.
That’s also similar, but is different in a few specific ways. For starters, it’s not a member of the society being sacrificed, it’s an outsider (the space whale).
It’s not that the SNW ep has some similarities to Le Guin’s story-it’s that the setup is damn near identical.
I think “The Rings of Akhaten” is closer.
I was checking to see if someone else got there before me-glad you did! Yes, I think Doctor Who’s The Beast Below definitely feels inspired by Those Who Walk Away from Omelas, and I really love it for that. Even with the differences (and there *should* be differences, otherwise it really would be an unauthorized adaptation), it has much of the same emotional punch, the unthinkable “bargain” between the torment of a sentient being and the well being of an entire civilization. The concept of children is worked in very movingly, as the motivation for the whale’s actions. The episode is very Whovian in how it honors Le Guin’s work, since the Doctor often concerns themself with the idea that all sentient beings deserve compassion and care. I’ve never really understood the notion of different creative takes on similar themes being “rip offs”-on the contrary, I think it’s important to explore the meaning of such themes from different perspectives. For me, it deepens understanding.
I was reminded of the Controller in the episode Bad Wolf.
Sometimes I think people confuse tropes with entire concepts, and this is the case with Strange New Worlds' "Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach." Le Guin didn't really pioneer the trope of "Powered by a Forsaken Child" that both her short story and the SNW episode operate on - you can trace this trope all the way back to mythology across a variety of different belief systems and religions. I don't think creative use of a literary trope really requires an explicit "inspired by" or "based on" acknowledgement, personally speaking - so Robin Wasserman and Bill Wolkoff don't really need to thank Le Guin specifically, just as Le Guin doesn't need to thank the individual historians who preserved ancient mythology. Now if more specific elements of Le Guin's work were employed I'd say my view would change, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. The two stories stand well enough on their own, in my view, and in many ways tell a different story despite sharing a core similarity.
I'm torn. I definitely feel like it maybe doesn't *rip off* the story but it definitely lifts heavily from it, specifically the components of the suffering child kept in the dark below the city, the festival, etc. But did it also expand on in the context of SNW's characters and arching themes of self-sacrifice, destined pain, and such? Totally and that adds a different nuance that the original story didn't have for obvious reasons. I'm just not sure, it still doesn't entirely sit well with me... I think I would've at least liked a credit footnote or something saying "inspired by" or "in memory of LeGuin" or something that would've fended off these discussions of plagiarism etc etc
I would have liked to see a credit of some sort, too, not because of "plagiarism" which is nonexistent, but simply because I loved Le Guin so much.
LeGuin *was* mentioned in the credits. Go back for a closer look! ;)
I think it's funny the fact that no one knows where the copying versus stealing quote comes from, is probably because everyone who said it was "stealing" the quote from someone else
I kind of hope whomever did coin it, did so anonymously _specifically_ so know could know where it actually came from.
It's Mark Twain he said: "There is no such thing as an original idea."
He argues we can turn old ideas into new, curious combinations, but he reckoned they are “the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.”
I mean strictly maybe no one knows for absolute sure but Quote Investigator Dot Com has an article on it and they do really good work, so you can learn a great deal about who said things like that quote over the years and how it came to be attributed to various people.
Reading it TS Eliot did actually write in a 1920 essay "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal" and that may be the earliest instance of that sort of sentiment,
As Abraham Lincoln said "There are a lot of badly attributed quotes on the internet." 😉 Luckily there are also some good ways to look them up on the internet.
@@r.russellkingsr.2296 Henry Fielding said that the antient [sic] authors were a commons upon which all modern writers could draw at will.
@@rmsgrey Lequin is not ancient enough
.
This is also a very notorious and most famous thought experiments in philosophy: "The Trolley Problem"
It states:
"A train is barreling down a track at five people. You’re in position to throw a switch, diverting the train to another track where it would only hit one person. So here’s your choice: Should you let the five people die, or make an active choice to kill the one person?"
Everyone has to go in that case, including any witnesses.
Le Guin was an amazing author. Her works still to this day help me cope with some of the harsh realities of life. Steve to you, I recommend, the poem “The Valley”. It’s one of the best things ever put to paper and I still get choked up reading it aloud. Cheers buddy.
Just read it and it’s almost hypnotic. But I don’t feel like I understand it, and then I wonder if that’s somehow the point.
Something I didn't really appreciate until watching this video's recap is how vital the subplot with M'Benga's daughter is to making the whole story work. The Omelas thought experiment is only really interesting if the sacrifice of the child involves a tradeoff that is *understandable* even if it's not morally acceptable. The problem is that life in the Federation, at least on the core/home planets, is *already* generally depicted as pretty utopian, and they seem willing to share non-military tech and resources with other already-advanced species. But against that backdrop, the Omelas tradeoff doesn't seem like a genuine moral quandary: A society that tortures a kid to make already incredibly comfortable and wealthy people like 2% better off is not making some appalling but comprehensible tradeoff; they're just irredeemable sadists. You couldn't sell it as something otherwise decent-seeming people are able to rationalize.
The M'Benga subplot drives home that, idyllic as it might normally seem, there's still plenty of disease and death and suffering there that the people on Majalis avoid. Which pushes the Majalan society back into the realm of "interesting moral quandary" rather than just making them cartoonishly monstrous. At least if you don't think about it too hard, since it's implied the Majalans *could* share their medical tech with the Federation if they wanted, and that at least some of it would work without the whole child torture machine. But shh, never mind that.
It's interesting - M'Benga is stuck on the wrong side of the Majalen's own general order one.
To me both civilisations are applying general order one to prevent less advanced civilisations misapplying advanced technology - they can't ensure the tech isn't misapplied unless the other civilisations _share their morals_. The federation's test is "can you work together well enough as a civilisation to crack this incredibly difficult scientific task". The majelans one is "can you live here, where none of us suffer except one willing sacrifice, and accept our solution to the trolley problem as valid". It is a valid solution, just not a humanly popular one.
@@tomharrison1393 I thought that the sacrifice of that child is what makes the medicine work, and that they did not want to share with people who would would not sacrifice on their own but would instead condemn them
"...irredeemable sadists."
Bear in mind one terrifying similarity between three characters.
This episode was all about three people who were destined to live out their lives stuck in a big chair.
There's a line from John Hodgman's book More Information Than You Require that has always stuck with me: "Ideas are not property, they are infections. They have no allegiance to their host body: they pass from brain to brain untraceably, or simply break out spontaneously, separated by continents or even centuries, without explanation." I always try to keep it in mind during conversations like this. No idea is truly original; our creativity comes from combining ideas into new forms. The only "ripping off" is repeating combinations that have already been tried.
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omalas was hugely influential. It's to the point where there's an entire entry on TVtropes, "Powered By A Forsaken Child." I'm not really sure if it counts anymore. It's like saying that all space opera sci-fi is a ripoff of Forbidden Planet.
That being said, JK Rowling definitely ripped off Le Guin with the wizard school, but that's a whole other issue.
Thank you so much for addressing the issue of "ripping off" another work. People like to claim this all the time about TV series, and I think if's usually unjustified. A great story can be made over and over again and still find new things to teach us.
I think most of the best episodes of _Trek_ from across all of its series and movies are variations on existing sci-fi stories. It's not stealing to explore an idea someone else already examined.
It was a nice adaptation of Le Guin's story. I just wish there had been some kind of acknowledgement for her.
It's an important thought piece.
And we do benefit from the suffering of children.
When I watched the episode I had never heard of the Omelas story and Le Guin has only ever been in my periphery.. To me, the story seemed really parallel to present day arguments against gun laws in the US. "Thoughts and prayers for the children who suffer but there's simply nothing we can do." Based on your summary and quotes from Omelas, I get the same vibe but in a much broader sense of a general criticism of our capitalistic system-- we all know that people suffer under the weight of it but "obviously it's better this way because of all the prosperity afforded to the rest of us" (quotes because it's not my opinion). For me, it was both interesting thought experiment and horrifying commentary on our current reality.
People/children will still die no matter what political system is followed, so better to have the maximum amount of personal freedoms rather than being enslaved under the yolk of tyranny that “tries” to keep everyone safe. It’s not possible.
I once translated the same concept from LeGuin into a RPG scenario. The players didn't know the short story beforehand and that put them into the position of choosing what to do. I think this kind of story is even better when they are translated into interactive media (RPG, videogame or similars), that gives weight to the moral dilemma when the public doesn't only observe it, but partakes in it.
I mean, if you're gonna "steal," steal from the best, right? But I actually think that this isn't a case of theft so much as conscious, genuine homage to LeGuin. I'm glad you mentioned The Dispossessed up front because as soon as it was revealed that Prospect VII was a colony world, I got serious Dispossessed vibes as well. So it's like, what if Omelas but Dispossessed but Star Trek?
I love that you brought up how it’s a classic utilitarian thought experiment. Many writers have used it as a jumping off point.
That said, a story credit, or at least a special thanks, for LeGuin would’ve been nice to see.
The very end had me cackling as well, Gene absolutely loved plagiarising (but not Gene L Coon!)
I think that U. K. LeGuin, a titan of science fiction and moral visionary, would welcome this episode disseminating her vital message to a new audience. The SNW episode was very well done, took up Leguin's motif and ran away with it with excellent results. I only wish U.K. LeGuin had lived long enough to write a story about the society the ones who walk away from Omelas had built... now that would be a challenge! Thanks for a great segment and the U.K. LeGuin appreciation, Steve!
Ursula Le Guin is one of my very favourite authors so this episode suffered a bit in my estimation from that. In a "Le Guin did it better!" Kinda way.
I still think that, but after a rewatch I did like the episode a bit more. There's a lot it does well. Making the kid a central character we get to know and sympathise with is an obvious choice in expanding the premise and building a narrative. The story the Majalans tell themselves, that the First Servant makes a willing sacrifice for the rest of them that they must honour & be grateful for, doesn't hold up to scrutiny when you consider that the First Servant is chosen at birth & raised his whole life for this. How can that be a real choice?
I wouldn't put it among the best of the season but Strange New Worlds set such a high average that it's still a pretty great episode.
I agree.
It was a good episode but not a great one.
I was in a production of Omelas in Portland OR. back in the 80s. Got to meet Le Guin a few times. She was a pleasant and gracious lady.
In retrospect I don't think the production was that successful because too much had to be explained to the audience. But it was fun.
Oh and Dovstoevsky.
The One Who Walk Away from Omelas is more of an Outer Limits episode than a Star Trek episode...
I've heard of that story before. What troubled me more was the pilot, which basically reprised "The Day the Earth Stood Still" with the Enterprise crew as the aliens (Klattu). No, there wasn't any Gort, but it's still similar. And foreshadowing this by having Pike watch the old movie doesn't make it more acceptable.
Stretching a 7 page short story to one hour of TV without introducing any more content may seem like an impossible task, but if anyone could, it's the writers for Star Trek Picard.
Ursula based her story off of Dostoyevsky's work... so really you cannot say they ripped her off. This is a clickbaity sort of title. LeGuin is quoted as saying:
""The central idea of this psychomyth, the scapegoat", writes Le Guin, "turns up in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov, and several people have asked me, rather suspiciously, why I gave the credit to William James. The fact is, I haven't been able to re-read Dostoyevsky, much as I loved him, since I was twenty-five, and I'd simply forgotten he used the idea. But when I met it in James' 'The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life', it was with a shock of recognition."
Let's not bring capitalist notions of ripping people off into art, all writers are inspired by their idols and LeGuin is a figure with a HUGE shadow.
There's also been criticisms of the character of Una ripping off DC Fontana as well (at least not attributing back to her) and of course, going back to the days of Voyager, "Blink of an Eye" ripping off "Dragon's Egg," and I think the differences are enough (well, I think the episode "Ghosts of Ilyria" should have added a note at the end "In Memory of DC Fontant" myself, but that's just my opinion). We can also look at many pop culture movies, etc. and their similarities such as Woody Allen's "Blue Jasmine" which is obviously at least a homage to Tennessee Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." As someone who has taken Master courses in Post Modern Literature, common syncretic allegories and references and sources to find and discover are very, very common nowadays than ever before (back in the day it was more truly public domain to the bible, legends, myths, fairy tales, etc.). While I have a few issues with this episode, it's not "oh my, ripping off Ursual Le Guin." Actually, the 9th episode may have even more callbacks to the Alien/Ripley universe, but again, this is a common trend in postmodern storytelling. As always when it is truly plagiarism, etc. but none of the examples I just mentioned do that. Mollie and the Old Man UA-camrs may always complain about this, but I understand enough what's going on. It's more who does it better when they do this, of course. :)
"Blink of An Eye" and "Dragon's Egg" are both preceded by Ted Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God" from the early 1960's.
Only “Omelas” isn’t properly a story at all, but more a parable, or thought experiment, or mediation, on the way we live our lives; as opposed, perhaps, to the way we should be living them. As such, the SNW episode, which for better or worse IS an actual story, cannot be said to be a ripoff. I’m more interested in the question of what LeGuin, who I was privileged to meet some years ago, would have thought of it as art. As a world-famous genre author who liked Trek (she wrote an appreciation of TNG for TV Guide as it was ending its run), I suspect that she would have enjoyed it, but who knows?
I love that people get into a craze about this stuff. Last week I saw a review of the Enterprise episode 'Dawn' and how many say it's a rip off of Enemy Mine. And if that's true and this episode is a rip off Le Guin too, then the first Star Trek pilot is a rip off of Forgotten Planet!
This isn't the critique that people think it is. It's just how writing works.
Frankly, I thought the SNW episode had more in common with the TOS "Spock's Brain" episode....
Sacrificing a child so the greater whole can thrive is common fixture in many stories, Steinbeck's; The Pearl, the Saint George myth, lots mythology and even history built around child sacrifice.
It's a very good point that, while the story obviously takes inspiration from Le Guin, nothing is wholly original. Inspiration is a chain that goes back forever. Also, while the SNW story does put Pike in a position where he has to make the moral decision form the short story, it also has other things to teach him that aren't in Le Guin. Lessons like there are some things worse than his apparent fate, and also, in the context of that fate, that there are things he can't control, that he can't fix.
Yup. Take away Romeo and Juliet, and a mountain of modern romance literature crumbles. The concept of an innocent reluctant suffering savior that redeems a world from its sins is also a common theme. When an author asks a question and another author answers the question, it isn’t a rip off. The questions are not rhetorical. The original author wants us to explore. I am reminded of a saying that says, every modern situation comedy is a rewrite of I Love Lucy episodes. As an artist I am acutely aware of IP rights. But somewhere between homage, satire, and parody an answer is born that lives in an unique point of view. Not one that copies the original but one that carries the original idea forward.
I have loved Le Guin's writing for many years. Along with the people Le Guin credits for her inspiration there is another short story with a the germ of the idea in it. Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery".
This also reminds me of the real life child goddesses of Nepal, the Kumari. While they don't necessarily suffer, they also aren't given a choice, and as soon as they hit puberty, they are no longer considered devine and have to figure out how to live like normal people after having been worshipped their whole lives.
I read that story in college. It's haunted me since.
Maybe it's not as well known, but I'm always a little surprised that "Duet" didn't offer any credit to the author of "The Man in the Glass Booth" about a Jewish businessman captured and put on trial for being a N*zi war criminal.
Definitely a case of inspiration rather than ripoff, but it still would have been nice to see the credit offered, all the same.
I think my favorite take on the tale of Omelas is The Scholomance series by Naomi Novik, because (scholomance spoilers below)
It features the daughter of one who walked away from an Omelas grabbing a metaphorical gun in one hand and metaphorical brick and mortar in the other, and walking ominously back in.
Omelas always reminds me of the Gadsden flag, commonly seen flying from the houses in my area. "Don't tread on me," it reads. But being familiar with the people who live in those houses, I sadly know to add the parenthetical "go tread on that neighborhood I wouldn't dream of living in instead."
I saw the video title and automatically knew which TNG episode he was referring to.
Time for me to finish reading the Hainish cycle.
Seriously, at the very least, read *The Left Hand of Darkness* .
SNW, not TNG.
I also jumped to that conclusion, but tbf the similarities between The Left Hand of Darkness and Outcast run somewhat less deep.
@@Krolose_hill the use of the world "pervert" for a member of their race expressing only one gender made me think it was a deliberate reference. In each case, the story itself was less important than the exploration of humanity and gender.
If a show were created to examine the everyday life in the Federation, Le Quin is one of the few people who I think could've done it justice. Most writers only add more technology to their everyday life and leave it at that. No real thought about how motivations and experiences might change in a different milieu with different adaptation structures
Despite having a crush on Lindy Booth since Jett Jackson, I think I must've fallen asleep before this episode ended, because I can't recall that horrible ending (my despairing wife would sometimes not wake me, and in my torpor, and due to not being entirely sold on the series, I guess I didn't go back for a recap).
That reminds me of the denouement of Torchwood's Children Of Men, though, which may also owe something to Omelas.
Personally I think the safest and most respectful thing to do would have been to give Le Guin co-author credit. Yes there are sub-plots, characterisation and general fleshing out and the episode writers certainly did enough to justify their own credits but the core of the story comes from Le Guin's work, the rest is decoration rather than any new twist on the idea so I'd say this goes beyond mere "inspiration". As for the legal precedents, you get all kinds of odd judgements in plagiarism cases (the world of popular music is full of them). Maybe it depends on how well known you think the Le Guin story is (Steve suggests very - I'm not sure). I was familiar enough to recognise that this was a retelling without having actually read the original but I have no idea how typical that is of the audience in general.
"Who Actually is Captain Sisko's Greatest Nemesis?"
I feel like everyone will say Dukat or Winn, but IMHO it's himself. Ben fighting against the will of the Prophets and his sacrificing his Starfleet ethics? Ben Sisko is his own worst enemy.
For a relatively quick, easy, and rewarding introduction to Le Guin, I highly recommend The Lathe of Heaven. I take it as a deceptively simple-seeming play on the fairy tale of the fisherman's wife, and having read it I have found myself reflecting back on it often over the years. They've tried to adapt it a couple of times, but the very first one by PBS, starring a young Bruce Davison as George Orr, probably remains the best.
It's a very Philip K Dick sort of story.
I consider The Lathe of Heaven the best. I saw the original airing on PBS that they changed afterward because it featured the Beatles music without their permission. I feel like I stand alone, it's part of my DNA now, and nobody knows what I'm talking about.
@@charlestaylor3195
It's not one of her better known stories and it was quite a surprise when PBS adapted it.
This feels like a trolley car with extra steps
Very good analysis and excellent ending, Steve
If you haven't read The Left Hand of Darkness you haven't lived.
Mark Twainsaid: "There is no such thing as an original idea."
He argues we can turn old ideas into new, curious combinations, but he reckoned they are “the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.”
Maye SNW should acknowledge her in any new credits. a starship Le Guin, a starship EarthSea.
You have absolutely missed some of the greatest science fiction writing EVER if you have not read Ursula K. LeGuin.
Out of all the new Trek, Strange New World's is hands down the best of the bunch.
Also, didn't they steal Spock's brain in TOS to run an idyllic city? Which predates the Omelas story.
That’s…not the same premise or storyline.
@@JAMESLEVEE I think the idea of that episode was more about class disparity which is relevant and certainly a way to read this story, where I feel that here it's more specifically about whether the needs of the many justify the sacrifice of a unconsenting few.
Ursula K Le Guin also wrote The Lathe of Heaven. She was a professor at Portland State University and a wonderful conversationalist. We really miss her. ua-cam.com/video/M8VRbaVNvSA/v-deo.html
Creators take inspiration from other creators all the time. I read a great book called "Benchley" written by Preston that took inspiration from Jaws. That said, it wasn't another Jaws remake. It took the writer of Jaws, Peter Benchley, and put him into a situation that would eventually inspire his writing of the classic story of Jaws. It is a fairly new book and is only now gaining traction, but it would not exist without the writing of Peter Benchley. Is that stealing? After reading Preston's original work, I would say absolutely not. If anything, it corrects some issues created by Bencley's Jaws in terms of blaming a force of nature for perceived intentional acts.
Thanks for this video, Steve. It really opens up a discussion about new stories and where they come from.
So, the comment about Pike getting a peek was an unintended reference to the "Pike's Peak" memes about his hair...or was it?
That episode was very hard for me to get through... I hope, that I'd be one of the people to leave the city. I just don't believe I could live a life of joy, while an innocent child suffers !!!! It would eat my soul up...
I think any beef with the episode isn't that it was done, but the degree to which the original Le Guin story was or wasn't listed in the credits, based on specific story points that elevate the subject from philosophical musings to a specific expression of the idea. For instance, the TOS episode Arena has basically an adaptation of an earlier story, and was credited as such, even though the Trekness of it made it distinct from the original story.
Drawing inspiration from the specific Le Guin story without crediting it, and then falling back on justifying it by saying it was drawing upon the same themes she did and just a coincidence, or that it's OK to rip her off because she was drawing upon earlier works (which still begs the question of the degree to which the writers of the specific episode were aware of what influenced Le Guin) seems like a deception.
It's not like either story is original in its premise. There have been many instances of civilisations thought history that sacrificed a child at periodic intervals to continue the prosperity of their societies.
I know of two other Trek episodes that have "riped off" a great work of SF. The first is the TOS episode Arena, which is remarkably similar to a 1944 short story by Fredric Brow also titled Arena. The other is the Voyager episode Blink of an Eye, which has striking similarities with the 1980 novel Dragon's Egg, by Robert L. Forward. The first rip off was unintentional, the writer independantly came up with the same idea, the similarities were noticed soon before filming the episode was to begin, the production team reached out to Brown who was happy to let the episode be made in exchange for a mention of his name and story in the credits, which was done. The other, well, nobody knows for sure, except for those directly involved, because nobody ever made a statement, official or otherwise, about it. Both work of literature are outstanding in their own right, I strongly recommend you look them up.
I read LeGuin’s story as a teen and thought it was an analogy for Israel and Palestine. I had just read Le Carre’s Little Drummer Girl, so that might have nfluenced me.
The setting is somewhat reminiscent of The Dispossessed as well - the Terans showing up as conflict explodes between the twin worlds, one luxurious and the other austere. Thank you for mentioning The Brothers Karamazov and William James. wonderful stuff.
You forgot to mention the TOS episode “Spock’s Brain”
Le Guin has long been influential in the most thought-provoking examples of sci-fi on the screen.
Star Trek: The Next Generation’s episode ‘The Chase’ centres around the crew’s discovery of fragmentary DNA evidence that all humanoid species are descended from a single species, who ‘planted’ their DNA throughout the galaxy. This concept is the same as Ursula Le Guin’s ‘Hainish Cycle’ of novels and stories, which comprises the majority of her science fiction genre writing.
Avatar was partly inspired by (i.e.ripped off) Ursula Le Guin’s ‘The Word for World is Forest’, a haunting novel featuring humans trying to mine (i.e destroy) a planet populated by humanoids living in and having a psychic connection with the forest.
Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness is one of my favorite books, I let a few years pass before I go back and read the book again. Her style, her worlds are unique in the SciFi genre.
Once (back in the pre 'net days of BBSes) someone asked "What would you do if the couple in the apartment above yours had a *really noisy* bed?" Somebody answered "I'd just oil the bed."
"That's silly," I thought. "It's not your bed -- You'd be interrupting the couple upstairs." Then, I let my imagination wander and wrote a short story (4-5 pages, I guess) about how that interaction would work -- complete with inside jokes and transporting characters from the community into the story. My story won an award for the best post of the year, even thought *everybody **_also_** knew about the interaction that it was sourced from.*
In fact, the fact that everybody knew about the source of the premise of the story probably made it that much more interesting.
You could probably start with the premise of "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas and create *dozens* of stories -- each one being quite distinct from all the others.
I admit to -- while watching the episode -- turning to my wife and saying "This reminds me of an Ursula K LeGuin story". I'm glad I wasn't the only one. 😀
Sorry to burst your balloon, but I was in a discussion of this moral dilemma in my freshman philosophy class several years before Ursula LeGuin's "Omelas" story was published. But thank you for bringing the question up, because the suggestion of this theme being a rip-off of another story presented during Holy Week, has answered a question which has puzzled me for quite a while. How the freak did Luke, who was the only Gospel writer NOT present in the Garden of Gethsemane, know the details of Jesus' prayer? The disciples who WERE there were all zonked out!?! I conjecture that this same philosophical exercise about whether it is ethical to make even a single innocent suffer for the sake of all, caused St. Luke to conjecture verses 42-44 of his 22d chapter. But then calling "The only way this could be ethical is for the Suffering Servant to be a volunteer who knows what [s]he is in for." the Gesthemane Criterion, makes for a logical time-loop over two millennia long ... a new Star Trek record!!! Awesome 😎 , gang!
The video claims the basic moral dilemma is not original, you are not bursting the bubble of anyone who actually watched the thing through.
In this video there is a verbatim quote from William James from 1891 that details the basic premise of the story (what if a society existed where the permanent happiness of millions depended on the suffering of one person on the outside). And it is mentioned that LeGuin's subtitled the story "Variations on a theme by William James." Also she admitted some inspiration from Dostoyevsky.
I think the way Torchwood: Children of Earth twisted this trope was fun
Good job! Ursula K Le Guinn’s The Dispossessed is incredible. It’s to the credit of the writers that they riff on her Omelas tableau.