Peeking into the rock

John Scalzi usually writes gentle, friendly stuff in his blog, often silly and frivolous, a relief from the working day. Every so often he takes a moment to write something serious. Kind of frequently lately, because we live in serious times, I guess.

He does it here, where he generalizes just enough from the Penn State scandal.

I remember when I kept finding people on the science fiction newsgroups who would complain about Ursul K. LeGuin, and the example they held up as terrible writing was exactly the story Scalzi references here -- "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." They were wrong, and Scalzi is right, as usual.