where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas." Inspiration and themes Le Guin stated that the city's name is pronounced "OH-meh-lahss". Le Guin hit upon the name of the town on seeing a road sign for Salem, Oregon, in a car mirror. "[… People ask me] 'Where do you get your ideas from, Ms. Le Guin?' From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?" "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." The quote from William James is: Dostoyevsky's original description of the dilemma refers to the doctrine of salvation through the crucifixion of Jesus. Publication history Le Guin's piece was originally published in New Dimensions 3, a hardcover science fiction anthology edited by Robert Silverberg, in October 1973. It was reprinted in Le Guin's The Wind's Twelve Quarters in 1975, and has been frequently anthologized elsewhere. It has also appeared as an independently published, 31-page hardcover book for young adults in 1993. It was republished in the second volume of the short-story anthology The Unreal and the Real in 2014. Introducing the short work in her 2012 collection The Unreal and the Real, Volume Two, Le Guin noted that "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" "has a long and happy career of being used by teachers to upset students and make them argue fiercely about morality." Cultural legacy Game Designers Ricardo Bare and Harvey Smith drew upon "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" as inspiration for the supernatural being of the Outsider in the Dishonored video game series. In Plotted: A Literary Atlas, artist and author Andrew DeGraff illustrated a map visualizing Le Guin's story. DeGraff wrote that: "Le Guin provides us with the building blocks to construct the city of Omelas, but if we want to forsake it afterward, then we too have to strike out alone." The 2017 music video for "Spring Day" by South Korean band BTS references Le Guin's short story, both thematically and