‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ is one of Ursula K. But the idea behind the story came from both Fyodor Dostoevsky and from the nineteenth-century psychologist, William James. Le Guin’s 1973 short story ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, came from her reading a road sign for Salem, Oregon, (‘Salem, O.’) in her car’s rear-view mirror. Omelas, the distinctive-sounding but entirely fictional city in Ursula K. Writers can get ideas from the strangest of places.
