The Philosopher Kings Reveals What Happens to the Children of Utopia

We open 20 years later. The Just City is no longer filled solely  with the ragtag classics majors who fervently prayed to be there. They’re now responsible for the 10,000 children they brought into the city and raised and educated, and for those children’s children. What happens to the next generation, who never asked to live it a dream of civilization, and have ideas of their own? What is your obligation to them—and to those who have left, deciding their dream is different than yours? And let’s not forget, always in the background: the butterfly wings of your obligation to time itself. What happens if this thought experiment, which was always meant to disappear without a trace, threatens to leave marks that can never be erased? This is a book that is, more than anything, about dealing with the consequences of someone else’s dream.
The city is still dealing with the fallout of the big bang that ended the first novel, when the goddess Athena and Socrates had their infamous Last Debate on the actual “justness” of the Just City, after which the goddess vanished, taking all her technology and divine help with her (not to mention Socrates, who she turned into a fly on her way out), and left behind a revolt that culminated in the rebel Kebes and his followers storming out of the city, which is now known as the Remnant, since that is quite literally what it is: the original population has split into five different cities, each with their own spin on the original “utopia.” They’ve descended from Plato’s ideals of friendship into regular warfare. And because these are scholars, it’s warfare not over gold or land, it’s a war over Botticellis and Raphaels—these are art raids. During one of them, a key character is killed, the catalyst for the journey of grief, revenge, and self-discovery that consumes the rest of the novel.
The utopia’s founders and its children must come to terms with the urgent questions and crises of character that the end of Eden obliges them to confront. With beautiful irony, it is Apollo, the ultimate child of utopia, a god who chose to divest himself of divine power so he could learn to become human, who is the focus of much of the knowledge, and illustrates the central conflict of the novel: when faced with the undeniable truth of your humanity (no divine power or technological cheats to fall back on), what do you do next? Apollo is forced to truly lives as human, testing the limits of his belief system for the first time.
The stakes are high, because Apollo’s choices will affect his children, who are the other major focus of the book. They are the third generation in this New World, and far enough from its source to be able to see the both the glories and failures of their parents’ mistakes. They are now beginning to come into their own power and make their own choices in a world where it is no longer blasphemy to question Plato.

Plato’s ideal “Philosopher Kings” were rulers who could reason their way through anything, and use logic to rise above life and strive toward his highest exhortation: excellence. The novel frequently contrasts this excellence with urges that we recognize as less noble, but indelibly human: unending grief, unreasonable grudges, envy, the need to know someone is ultimately in charge, and the desire to find a way to game the system. Characters must constantly choose between these Platonic and human urges—and, as a reader, I found myself rooting as often against Platonic “perfection” as for it, and questioning how much I would be willing to give up for excellence.
There is an illuminating argument between two characters throughout: one whose goal is to synthesize all religion into one perfect whole out of a desire to know that perfection can be achieved, and another who believes that perfection is an ideal we were always meant to question—that we are the only ones responsible, and we have to keep trying, however imperfect the results. As Stoppard told us, it’s the wanting to know that makes us matter. We might experience fleeting perfection, but it won’t last, and it is not meant to. We must keep going, or we die.
The novel’s two great questions converge when Apollo and the other characters eventually discover the whereabouts of Kebes and his followers, and what “excellence” means in fact and action. In the end, some have the courage to accept a nuanced understanding, while others cannot, and as you would expect in any Greek tale, their choices make their fates. The ending both justifies the efforts of our original philosopher pioneers and is punchline that works on several levels. It points to the next steps on the journey, and left me conducting my own thought experiment about what might happen next.
I’d delighted that we don’t have to send prayers to Athena to be graced with more time in the Just City. At last update, Walton was nearly done with the third and final book in the series, Necessity.