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Jo Walton’s The Just City is a Clash of the Philosophical Titans
In The Just City, the gods are real—the Greek ones, at least (the jury’s still out on Jesus and Buddha). Athena, goddess of wisdom, decides one day to put a grand thought experiment into action: she founds a city, one constructed and operated on the framework laid out by Plato in The Republic. She gathers together scholars, philosophers, and idealistic dreamers from across time to populate it (along with a few far-future robots to act as overseers). By discussion and committee, these great thinkers build a community, debating long into the night about what their Founding Father, Plato, would have wanted. Compromises are made (like America, this nation also fails to realize that slavery is a ticking time bomb), but deemed necessary, and not likely to affect what is sure to be a shining City on a Hill.
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Then, Athena raises the stakes, adding complicating factors to this already fragile idyll: 10,000 children, orphans and slaves brought (and often bought) in to be the next part of the experiment: a generation reared entirely on Platonic principles and given an ideal classical education of mind and body. As these children reach adulthood, they will sorted into “metals,” according to the strengths that they have revealed, and trained to take over for the masters, until there is no one left who remembers a time before Utopia. But children will always be children, unlikely to be keen on following the lofty ideals of a thinker they’ve never heard of.
Walton presents this intriguing world through the eyes of several different characters: Maia, a transplant from Victorian England, who must test her love for her adopted home against some very unPlatonic tragedies that befall her. Simmea, a slave child who grows up to be an ideal product of the Just City but is nonetheless forced to grapple with the darker side of its nature. Oh right, and then there’s the god Apollo. Yeah. That Apollo, who has chosen to be reborn as a powerless human in his sister’s experiment in order to better himself and his understanding of humans. He soon comes to understand rather more than he bargained for. And then there’s Socrates, brought to the city entirely against his will, who, once there, has more than a thing or two to say about his former pupil’s ideas.
You don’t have to be a philosophy major to enjoy this novel—it will appeal to anyone who is enjoying the recent wave of dystopian literature, with structures and themes that are reminiscent of the best of Divergent and The Hunger Games. Like those series, it treats on the dangers of trying to fit imperfect humans into perfect boxes, even when you’ve got the best of intentions—not to mention the help of the goddess of wisdom (we pesky humans, with our annoying free will).
Ah, free will. The premise allows Walton to let her characters lay out her arguments in Socratic dialogue, and the strongest theme of them all is the notion of free will. Even in a utopia imagined by a philosopher, where conversation and debate are meant to be the order of the day, real free thinking and differences of opinion lead to results that wise, moderate Plato likely never envisioned. Varying conceptions of free will and what to do with it bring the characters into conflict and bring the novel to a boiling point—just in time for it to end with an “OH WAIT, WHAT?!” cliffhanger that leaves us breathless with anticipation for the sequel, The Philosopher Kings, out later this year, giving you just enough time to process what is already one of the year’s most thought-provoking works of science fiction.
What’s your favorite S.F.-nal treatment of classical themes?