the ones who stay and fight N.K. Jemisin
What’s the T?
It’s the Day of Good Birds in the city of Um-Helat! The Day is a local custom, silly and random as so many local customs can be, and yet beautiful by the same token. It has little to do with birds—a fact about which locals cheerfully laugh, because that, too, is how local customs work.
It is a day of fluttering and flight regardless, where pennants of brightly dyed silk plume forth from every window, and delicate drones of copperwire and featherglass—made for this day, and flown on no other!—waft and buzz on the wind. Even the monorail cars trail stylized flamingo feathers from their rooftops, although these are made of featherglass, too, since real flamingos do not fly at the speed of sound.
Jemisin, N.K. “The Ones Who Stay and Fight – Lightspeed Magazine.” Lightspeed Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, 23 Jan. 2020, www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-ones-who-stay-and-fight/.
Why we loved it
The team at Extra Literary Affairs loved this amazing story! It’s a powerful answer to Ursula K. Le Guin’s famous tale “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” The book makes us face tough questions: What if we knew the secret keeping our society together? Would we do whatever it takes to protect it? Could we accept removing people who won’t help keep the peace? Jemisin’s exciting writing talks straight to readers, pulling us into the story and its hard choices.
In this episode, we explain:
- Why the writing works so well (it’s clear and well-organized)
- How this perfect world stays fair for everyone
- What it teaches us about building a good society
- The death penalty in a “perfect” world
- How real-life problems might have inspired the author
- Why science fiction helps us think about our own world
Read the story and let us know what you thought in the comments below!