Thursday, July 14, 2016

Jo Walton's The Just City investigates the nature of justice, while telling an enchanting story involving gods, mortals and robots trying to actually build the Just City hypothesized by Plato. The goddess Pallas Athene brings together 10,000 children and a few hundred adults from many different times and places to found a new city (on the island of Atlantis) according to Plato's prescriptions in The Republic. Plato's main goal in The Republic was to explain the nature of Justice (the words 'Just' and 'Justice' occur more than 150 times on the wikipedia page), so Walton has plenty of room to explore the idea from several different directions.

In order to get infrastructure in place without burdening the new inhabitants (who are supposed to be coddled and trained so they can understand Justice) the goddess brings in robots to build housing and meeting rooms. The robots are kept around to take care of maintenance and other tasks that Plato didn't describe the city's inhabitants as handling. When the historical Socrates (as envisioned by Walton) joins the city, he turns out to be a very inquisitive man. Since the robots display some autonomy, Socrates wonders whether they have individual personalities and whether they're thinking and aware. This leads to even more opportunities for questions about Justice.

Pallas Athene wants to populate the city with willing participants, so the children (exactly half girls and half boys) all are from disadvantaged circumstances. The adults are all people who prayed for a chance to live in Plato's Republic, so (considering how often the book is actually read in the original greek, and in what historical periods) most are men from antiquity, and the women are nearly all from more modern times. This leads to some interesting political factions, and changing of practices as time goes on and the oldest denizens die off first.

Not all of the children are happy to be there, even though all of them agree that their previous lives (most were slaves) were worse. Even so, not having been given a choice rankles with a few, and their reactions are also interesting.

Many of Plato's ideas are reasonably modern, but others are very outdated, like assigning citizens to societal roles according to their metal. The adults of The Just City spend a lot of effort training and testing the children in order to place them appropriately. Many of the adults are uncomfortable with this duty, but they carry it out, and even put their thumbs on the scales as necessary in order to make the numbers come out right according to Plato's very Greek ideas about numerical harmony. When some of the children figure out that test rankings are being adjusted in order to fit pre-defined notions of how many should be in each category, they challenge the adults, and as with everything else that goes on in the city, philosophical discussion and socratic dialogue ensues.

Since there's limited space on the island, procreation must be limited and sexual activity controlled. The children (and adults) find creative ways around the restrictions, but this means discussion of sexual mores and prohibitions are necessary. We hear about everything from rape and unwanted intimacy to Plato's ignorance of issues of women's hygiene. For the most part the adults attempt to do everything according to Plato's prescriptions, but there are several clear gaps in Plato's planning which leads to the need for endless committee meetings (most of which we, mercifully, hear about afterward, rather than having to endure.)

Walton does a wonderful job of presenting these philosophical questions of freedom, choice, and justice through the character's activity and interactions. In the end, we get to know these people who are all striving to be their best, and to create an environment in which justice is available to all, even though humans always have incompatible desires. We even get some satisfying answers to new and old questions and some unresolved issues to ponder on our own.

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