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The Just City
Group Reads Discussions 2020
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"The Just City" Discuss Everything *Spoilers*
First of all I want to thank Sarah for suggesting this book and all of the members who voted for it.I absolutely loved the weird idea of realising Plato's thought experiment and naturally failing with it. There was so much I loved in this novel. And even though I don't want to live in such a theoretically just city I would have loved to sit there with Sokrates, Simmea, Apollo and Kebes and listen to their discussions.
Jo Walton did such a terrific job with bringing together different eras and different point of views on volition and equality.
(and as a non-mature girlie comment: I always loved Apollo from the depths of my heart since I was a little girl and seeing him depicted so utterly adorable here was heartwarming!)
I also want to thank Sarah. I've had this series on my TBR since I read Among Others in 2015. I was afraid to start it, because I thought it would be too academic, meaning I wouldn't get much out of it, not having studied philosophy, history or Greek mythology. I shouldn't have worried, I enjoyed the heck out of the series, and while I'm sure I missed lots of brilliant things, there is so much here that everyone will surely come away with something!I knew before this that I enjoy Walton's writing, but I'm now planning on reading at least three more of her books very soon, and depending on how that goes, possibly all of them!
So glad to hear that, Anna! I, too, have put Jo Walton on my list of favourite authors and will read her works as completely as possible (this month I already read her "Lent" as another group's BotM and it was equally fascinating and philosphical)
Lent is one of the books I have lined up, the other two are Lifelode and Starlings. I read My Real Children earlier this year, and I really liked it!
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And I agree Anna- I think it's very accessible and not academic at all.
I had problems with it. For reasons of plot it needed to be an island with a volcano which means it would probably be Santorini. Yet Santorini was occupied by the Minoan civilization. What did Athena do with the Minoans?Secondly, I have never thought that Plato's Republic truly was utopian. When I read it, coincidentally at the age of 15 like Walton, I thought it was overly regimented and undemocratic.
I loved some of the female characters, but I was on team Socrates.
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No, it's an island in the real world. The sequel couldn't even be taking place if it weren't in the real world. There are references to Thessaly as the location, but there are no islands in the Thessalian Sporades that have a volcano. Yes, I know. I'm nitpicking. But I see it in terms of a larger issue of Plato's Republic being conflated with Atlantis in this novel.
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Kebes justified anger somehow didn't feel realistic. As with the rapes, there was an unhealthy amount of naivety and omissions of truth to carry the story to its ending/the setup for the sequel. Characters being silly to allow the story to get to a certain place is infuriating when it's done as obviously as this.
I don't engage much with Greek mythology and am unsure how well represented Athena was but she was an incredibly stupid God of Wisdom. That debate with Sokrates was absolutely dire.
A sore spot for me in recent weeks/months has been the refusal by the masses to recognize the influence of those that control knowledge. What gets remembered or allowed to be forgotten. This book seemingly following Plato's Republic included this meddling and that no time was spent discussing why it's bad irked me, but I'm getting used to that particular grievance.
All that said, I'm partial to a bit (read as 'lot') of philosophising so there was still plenty for me to like in this book and rate it 4 stars. I highlighted many a paragraph. Apollo was totally charming and Sokrates character was a delight.
I will definitely read the sequels.
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So it could be the Minoan island but it’s existing in a parallel timeline or something where the island is uninhabited.
I think this is explained better in book two. I’ll try to quote it for you and give you a page number when I have a few minutes.
Ryan wrote: "The refusal to tackle these issues and the perpetrators annoyed me immensely"I don't think the first book alone is meant to have many (if any) answers. I see the book more as a question, and in the sequels Walton will start giving us some of her own answers to the questions she poses here, as well as continuing to let us come up with our own questions and answers.
Doesn’t someone respond that it’s an island that’ll “not last” or be destroyed later and is bummed about this? I assumed it was Atlantis.
I see it like Anna here. I took the book as an attempt to bring something pure theoretical to life that never was meant to be real. Walton shows all the shortcomings and problems that arise because of that. To me this was quite convincingly done. Concerning the gods: most of the times I've read about Greek gods they were a quarrelsome, childish lot. So Athene's behaviour felt familiar.
@Dawn: yes it was mentioned somewhere that it was Atlantis.
I've been trying to look into the time and place, but I can't find anything that makes it clear. My understanding is:- The volcano is Thera, thus the island is Santorini
- The island is not outside of time, because Athene thought doing Republic on Olympos (= outside of time) would be pointless
- It is before the volcano erupts, but we never find out when exactly. There is more focus on this in the second book
- The Just City was supposed to inspire tales of Atlantis, and if we in the real world know it as the Minoan culture, in the book it was actually the Just City. A quick search tells me that the Minoan remains near Thera had the earliest plumbing ever found and that it might be the source of the Atlantis myth in our world. So to me that reads as the "Minoan" ruin that was destroyed in the Thera eruption was in fact Just City :)
But even if it was 1930 on the British isles, it wouldn't bother me in the slightest, because we have gods and time travel and all kinds of wackiness!
edit: Also I can't say more because it would be a spoiler, but there is something majorly significant in the sequels about this very thing.
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“Are they numbered in Latin or Greek?” Sokrates asked, leaning forward, urgently interested.
“Neither,” Kebes said. “They’re numbered in numbers.”
Sokrates looked blank."
Walton had the characters credit everything and everyone else for their genius after all.
@Ryan, I’m about 2/3 way through and I have the exact same issues as you. I also cringed at the talk about how the words the robots where writing couldn’t be Chinese because Chinese culture is “sooo different” where “incomprehensible” is heavily implied, as if English modern culture which they’re referring to only has anything in common with Greek or latin. It’s very grating!
@Anna Agree, the location of the island wasn’t really an issue for me amidst Greek gods coming to life and transporting people across time, haha!
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It wasn't her behaviour that irritated me but the (lack of) quality of her argument. It was wholly unconvincing and could have been beaten by a burp. The rest of the book deserved better.
Anna wrote: "Ryan wrote: "The refusal to tackle these issues and the perpetrators annoyed me immensely"
I don't think the first book alone is meant to have many (if any) answers. I see the book more as a quest..."
Sure, and I've no doubt that the later books will address the issues surrounding rape but I'm uncertain about the other issues. The intention may not have been to provide (m)any answers but the characters discussed many topics and could have touched on the topics I mentioned. It was a disappointment, but I recognize that it's somewhat unfair to be annoyed with an author for failing to write the book exactly as I would have preferred.
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Thank you, Dawn! I knew there was another/better example of dismissing the non-European, non-western contributions to humanities greatest achievements besides the number thing. That's a lot to make up for in the sequels.
I see your point Ryan! I just personally wasn't bothered by the lack of answers or (after the beginning) the lack of tackling the issues. It seemed to me that it was exactly as it was meant to be, to leave us (and them) mulling these things over while we wait to jump into the next part of the story. I was always going to read the whole series, so to me it didn't feel like things were left hanging. If I'd had to wait for the sequel, it would've been very unsatisfying!
The premise didn't make sense to me. The Republic certainly was influential in its time and for centuries afterwards. But Athene and Apollo knew of our time and later. Why follow Plato so dogmatically, with only a handful of exceptions, when human experience since his time has offered insight and critique?Overall, I did like it. Sokrates was awesome, and the three main characters were fine. I do think that the end brought us a change in Athene that was too abrupt. We didn't get hints of her pettiness before Apollo requested her healing intervention. The immediate fracturing of the City into several cities didn't make sense. Kebes wanted to leave all along, and maybe he could convince some others, but I don't see a complete disintegration as an outcome that had its seed planted earlier. I also have to protest a cliffhanger ending, but I do plan to read the next book at some point.
I loved this book. Socrates really emerged as a superstar whose only "power" was philosophy. I feel like he stole many of the scenes he was in. I will agree, however, that Athena seemed a bit underwhelming in the final debate -- I was hoping she'd be more formidable.
I enjoyed watching Apollo try to come to grips with living as a human and trying to become more humane via this experience. The talk he has with Simmea where they profess their love for each other was touching.
I thought the experiment was interesting and both noble and flawed. The class system reminded me of a bunch of YA type dystopias where society is more stratified (Red Rising - which I think has the same source material & Divergent).
I do like the idea of becoming the most excellent version of oneself and I found that inspiring.
I'm thankful I attended the virtual book club the other week where this was recommended to me!
One critique I could think of was the masters kept mentioning that the young ones would eventually become Philosopher Kings who would rule more justly than they ever could -- but... the masters are basically an all-star team of philosophers through the ages! Would a random ground of 10,000 children generate more intellectual superstars than that group? I don't think so?? But maybe the thought was with the perfect environment that greatness could be nurtured.
Finished it.There is waaaaaay too much sexual violence in it for my taste, I had quite enough of that after Octavia Butler. At least it was satisfying that the eugenics program and the way these young people are forced to copulate, have their babies taken away and relationships broken up are highly critisized by both Apollo and
Sokrates.
And I still don't understand what the point of Maia being raped by Ikaros was. The whole debate about volition and choice is based on Simmea's experience. There was no repercussions for Ikaros at all, to me it felt like it was taken much too lightly. Maybe that'll come in a later book, but then there should be a hint that it's still on the author's mind, now it just doesn't seem to be. It just felt gratuitous.
However, I love Greek mythology, I love Greek gods among humans, I love gods in human form, I *adored* Apollo and his genuine wish to learn and grow. And the whole debate by the end lead by Sokrates was fantastic and I was completely spellbound. Dialogue driven stories are one of my favorites so it definitely got me there :)
Overall 3 stars for a mixed experience.
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I agree that I sort of said "oh, Just City = Atlantis" and left it at that.
You all know that I cannot abide sexual violence just thrown out in books, and I was uncomfortable with a lot in this book, but I don't think it was left alone.
I was actually really impressed with how Maia and her whisper network feel...real to me. The event itself was perhaps too abrupt (I agree with Chris, a lot of this book felt abrupt to me) but the repercussions felt...honest. Not just, because that's what we're exploring. Ikaros is amiable, open-minded, fervent in his adoration of Plato...he is the classic image of the "philosopher king." And a rapist. What then? What is just? What is more just for the society? See how even in this "just" city, Maia, supposedly on equal footing with all her peers, is still not equal. See how she has to diminish herself to protect the whole, and how her own time's morals (never go with a man unchaperoned) inform her feelings about the encounter. What if she'd been a woman from the #metoo era? Would her sense of what is necessary and just been different? Maybe. Maybe not.
I didn't LIKE it, of course, but I could feel these threads throughout, the sense that the women knew things weren't what they were meant to be but that because they were better than what happened in their chronological lives, it was "more" just.
Gross, and fascinating as a metaphor for the things we see now.
There is definitely a lot of love for western thought and dominion, but...it IS a story about how brilliant Plato was and people who have that as their main uniting quality. I'd have liked a bit more on the othering that occurred based on relative age, lived age, and location of birth, too, but I also feel like this wasn't that story? This was a story about being in love with ancient Greece and a very, very narrow reading of it at that.
I found it abrupt and agree about the ending (f*ck cliffhangers and summary endings!! Grah!) but the concepts and the scenarios that let us explore volition and equal significance from so many different angles was my favorite part.
I finished the book last night and dove straight into the sequel, so some of what happens in the first few pages of The Philosopher Kings may colour my thoughts on this book. Apologies for that!I am a big fan of novels of ideas as a genre, and I adored this book as a very clever genre mashup example of that. I also enjoyed many of the characters and overall felt that the novel very much works around these two poles - concepts and ideas, on the one hand, and the messyness of concrete, incarnate people (a category that includes the messy, non-omniscient deities of Ancient Greece if ever it did any deities) on the other. Besides, these two categories reminded me of the most famous ideas of Plato's: the distinction between the realm of perfect ideas and the imperfect replicas of real life.
But I also felt that the book did a lot with the idea of what consent is and what it means and meant (especially for women and slaves across time and cultures). Yes, I agree that the rape scenes were uncomfortable and blows to the characters that happened to them, but I didn't feel they were in any shape or form gratuitous or not dealt with. Nor where they quite as much of a kick in the head as the rape scenes in the Octavia Butler I have read. Rather, I thought the book did a good job of also problematising the issue of Daphne that starts Apollo off- being human, he learns just what is wrong with his divine and immortal notion of consent.
Notably, this is what distinguished him from Athene for me. the grey-eyed lady seems human as Septima but she isn't and so she falls back on divine might when Socrates corners her (proving his point in the process by making him a second, male Ariadne).
Reading Alison's post right above mine made me wonder about something: with the ending in mind, I wonder whether the book is a story about how brilliant Plato was and how great Ancient Greece was? Because I think you could also read it as a story that says a lot about the way the fictional idea of Ancient Greece (Homer) and the fictionalised idea of Ancient Greece (see Sokrates' complaints about the dialogues) helped people create various "Greeces" (to coin a phrase) in their own minds and times, which now coalesce and collide in the Just City...
What do you think? Am I totally off in the wilderness with this reading?
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Apollo gets called out for almost raping a woman and he is sad and then everything is better and the woman is still a tree.
Maia is raped and she is very cross with her rapist but that is about the extent of it. I get that Walton is probably trying to show how flawed the Just City is, just like real life but there could have at least been an attempt at making that just.
I am in complete agreement with the rest of you that Socrates was the best character and was very entertaining. He was clearly the mechanism to sow some chaos on the island and did it well.
I know everyone's bored of me saying this, but many of those issues get more attention later in the series.I complete agree about Daphne though! I really wanted a scene with Apollo and tree-Daphne after everything he learned, but I had to imagine it myself.
I complete agree about Daphne though! I really wanted a scene with Apollo and tree-Daphne after everything he learned, but I had to imagine it myself. I agree with you, Anna, but I wonder whether that is something Apollo as Phileas could even do, according to the logic of deities making themselves mortal espoused in the story. Considering what we learn in the next book about the differences between mortalised deities, deities, heroes, and mortals, I wonder whether Apollo can even find Daphne (herself a wood nymph and thus a minor deity), especially as she may not want to be found by him?
I'll have to see what the rest of the trilogy does with Apollo and metaphysics and then maybe I could think about the scene some more. The book impressed me enough that I want to write fanfic for it anyway, so...
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Ryan, yes, I did notice that myself. I think there was only one woman and one man from our future? The man in question seemed a bit clueless about gender relations, and I don't think we learned enough about Klio's background to know why she wanted to escape to Plato's Republic.I feel like I'm being a bit defensive, but I do honestly hate reading about rape, and I would never try to explain anyone's reaction away, but *to me* these underwhelming reactions from everyone were kind of the point of including rape (and other atrocities) in the story. Yes, it was disgusting and rage-inducing and nothing was done to correct it. Or any of the other horrible things they did because they were following a thought experiment. Did some of them eventually learn something from it? I think so (having read the entire series). Was it worth it? I don't think so, but some of the individual characters would probably disagree with me.
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It maybe could have been done more elegantly, but in this case I don't think it was meant to shock or titillate or show how evil anyone is--she's drawing parallels to the source material, and it was instructive in comparison, for me.
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rated it 4 stars
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I still liked the book though.
Do you have a clear idea of what justice is? I don't. There's no example I can think of in the world of it. For years I've been incapable of even accepting it as a noble pursuit to strive for. Its not a conversation that the book could have posed because everyone with the exception of Sokrates shared an idea of what justice is.
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Did they?
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I also think much of this book hints at the evil of consensus over personal conviction.
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But would you say that the characters were comfortable with justice in that form?
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Their discomfort actually came from failing to rigorously exercise that process in all areas, which is what Sokrates argued at the end. The mating and childcare issues which so bothered them wasn't due to their form of justice, but that they allowed particular aspects of Plato's work to win out against any argument on the matter. There wasn't a debate or committee to challenge Plato's decision on breaking the bond between parent and child or how it could be done. That Plato ruled on it definitively was enough and it rankled them though they didn't have the courage to challenge it. If the process was the same as it was for the areas in which Plato said nothing then they would have more easily accepted the outcome, whatever it was.
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Does anyone see it differently or have something to add?
Allison wrote: "Extremely well articulated and such an interesting perspective, Ryan!Does anyone see it differently or have something to add?"
No, I agree with Ryan (and with you, Allison, that this was an extremely well-made argument). Actually, I think that is one of the major learning curves the book (and the trilogy) develops: society and community and justice are a process, not a state, and so no one person, be they ever so good a philosopher, can capture its essence for all time.
Makamu wrote: "Notably, this is what distinguished him from Athene for me. the grey-eyed lady seems human as Septima but she isn't and so she falls back on divine might when Socrates corners her (proving his point in the process by making him a second, male Ariadne)."I don't get the reference to Ariadne. I do see a parallel with the story of Metis, who was the first wife of Zeus. After Zeus hears a prophecy that her child would overthrow him, he transforms her into a fly and swallows her. Later he has an unbearable headache. He gets Hephaestus to split open his head, and out steps Athene, fully grown and armed.
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We do have a problem with deifying individuals instead of the good ideas that they had, leading us to throw everything they stood for away when their imperfections eventually get highlighted. No doubt that issue will be nestled somewhere amongst the pages too.
Chris wrote: "Makamu wrote: "Notably, this is what distinguished him from Athene for me. the grey-eyed lady seems human as Septima but she isn't and so she falls back on divine might when Socrates corners her (p..."Well, the myths all say that Athene was Zeus' favourite daughter - though I only know a version where his head split open without Hephastus' help because Hephaestus was Hera's (failed - misogyny alert) attempt at a head birth in revenge for Athene's birth. :) So, a case of "like father, like daughter", maybe?
And... I just realised that I should re-read my Greek myths before opening my mouth. I mixed up Ariadne - she of the thread and Theseus - and Arachne. How embarrassing! Thanks for callling me on that, Chris! *blushes*
Did anyone else think of the American Founders and the US Constitution? Or the sacred scriptures of various religions?Someone should write a novel about how Zombie Madison and Zombie Jefferson are running the US behind the scenes. It's so damned hard to change the Constitution. It truly is a tyranny of the dead. 🧟♂️
Interjecting a random comment. I haven't finished the book, nor have I read any of the posts here, but I needed to get this off my chest:I was born with a cleft palate. Leaving the baby out to be exposed for that "defect" made me want to throw my Kindle across the fucking room. Yes, I know it would have happened in ancient times, but still. ARGH. Then having to deal with that rapist SOB. Really wanted to throw my Kindle. Deep, personal cuts.
Rant over.
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Chris, lol! Yeah, I do think it's a great commentary on the ridiculousness of expecting one text to have every answer, especially as interpreted by people who can't interrogate the creator.
Makamu and Ryan, I guess I'll play devil's advocate. To me what I saw was the oppressive nature of true representation--people who refuse to participate, people who have power wielding it for their own benefit even if other ideas are better in some way; factions forming, ceding power to certain folks... I don't think they think their decisions are just, while the process may be as close to just as one can make it, and this book explores how a flawed premise thought through rationally, still produces a flawed result.
Interestingly, I think they found "just" ways of making rules, but I'm not sure they thought through how to deal with transgressors. One of their flawed premises is that people who seek justice must have a same understanding OF justice and want to fulfill it for the sake of the thing itself, not because of any social pressure. But I think we see that's not quite reality.
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SciFi and Fantasy Book Club
Books mentioned in this topic
The Philosopher Kings (other topics)Red Rising (other topics)
Divergent (other topics)
Lent (other topics)
Lifelode (other topics)
More...
A few questions to start us off though of course all thoughts and questions welcome!
1. What do you think of the concept?
2. What are your thoughts on how "just" the city is?
3. Would you like to live here?
4. Were there any elements that you didn't see coming?
5. Overall thoughts?