The Just City
Based on Wikipedia: The Just City
{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Just_City: "In January 2015, Tor Books released a novel that did not merely ask what an ideal society might look like, but forced its readers to sit in the courtroom of that society and watch the trial unfold. Jo Walton's The Just City is the opening act of the Thessaly trilogy, a work that immediately established itself as one of the most intellectually rigorous and emotionally resonant explorations of political philosophy in modern science fiction. To understand this book, one must first discard the notion of a typical fantasy novel where magic solves problems; instead, Walton presents a controlled experiment in human nature, a city built on the island of Thera before its catastrophic volcanic destruction, populated by ten thousand children and governed by the rigid, often cruel logic of Plato's Republic.
The premise is deceptively simple yet profoundly dangerous. The Greek goddess Athene, obsessed with wisdom and the pursuit of knowledge through study, decides to test whether a society can truly function if it strips away individual desire in favor of collective perfection. She gathers people from across human history—those who had prayed to her in their dying moments or deepest regrets, wishing they could live within Plato's ideal state. Among them are figures like Benjamin Jowett, the British translator of Plato, and Ellen Francis Mason, an American scholar, alongside ancient philosophers and Roman politicians. They become the "Masters" of this new city, tasked with raising a generation to embody the philosopher-king ideal.
But Athene is not alone in her hubris. Apollo, the god of literature, arts, and intuitive knowledge, chooses to join the experiment. However, he rejects divinity for this endeavor. He insists on being born as a mortal child, blending into the very population he claims to shepherd. This decision sets the stage for one of the most striking narrative voices in contemporary fiction: Pytheas, Apollo's human incarnation. Pytheas grows up among the ten thousand children acquired from slave markets across time and space. He is not a ruler; he is a student, a brother, and eventually, a witness to the cracks forming in the foundation of Utopia.
The human cost of this philosophical experiment is immediate and visceral. The city is built on the backs of children taken from their families, their histories erased to fit a mold designed two millennia prior by a dead philosopher. Simmea, an Egyptian girl plucked from the slave markets as a child, becomes the heart of this conflict. She is raised alongside Pytheas, but unlike him, she does not see the "Just City" as a divine gift. To her, and to her friend Kebes—a fiery agitator who views the city's structure as nothing more than a continuation of his enslavement—the experiment is a cage. They represent the silenced voice of the oppressed within the ideal state, the children whose individuality is sacrificed on the altar of collective harmony.
The narrative tension explodes in the fifth year of the city's existence with the arrival of Sokrates. This is not a metaphorical Socrates; it is the actual Athenian philosopher, summoned from history to serve as a guide for the Masters and a critical voice within the city. His presence precipitates a crisis that threatens to shatter Athene's perfect design. Sokrates does not affirm the justice of the city; he questions it. He exposes the contradictions inherent in a society built on slavery (the children) to achieve freedom, and one built on censorship to achieve truth. The arrival of Socrates transforms the story from a static description of a utopia into a dynamic, living Socratic dialogue where every certainty is interrogated.
Walton's cast is a dizzying array of historical minds forced to confront their own writings in real-time. There is Lukretia (Lucrezia Borgia), navigating the treacherous waters of power and gender; Atticus, the Roman friend of Cicero, wrestling with political pragmatism against moral absolutism; and Marsilio Ficino, the Florentine Neoplatonist, trying to reconcile his Renaissance idealism with a city that demands the suppression of love. Each character brings a different era's understanding of justice into collision with Athene's rigid framework. The result is a polyphonic narrative where the past speaks to itself, revealing that history is not a straight line toward perfection, but a tangled web of compromises and failures.
The setting itself, Thera, serves as more than just a backdrop; it is a ticking clock. Placed on the island prior to its volcanic destruction, the city exists under the shadow of inevitable annihilation. This geological certainty adds a layer of poignancy to the philosophical debates. No matter how perfectly they organize their society, no matter how strictly they adhere to Plato's rules, the earth beneath them is unstable. The volcano looms as a reminder that human constructs are fragile, and that nature cares nothing for political theories.
"(b)rilliant, compelling, and frankly unputdownable."
This was the assessment by Amal El-Mohtar at NPR, who noted the book's unique structure as a Socratic dialogue in novel form. The critical reception of The Just City highlighted its ambition and its risks. Michael Cart of Booklist described it as a "remarkable novel of ideas," acknowledging that while the concepts might be somewhat "abstruse" for some readers, this intellectual density never detracts from the quality of the plot or the depth of the characterization. The book demands engagement; it does not offer easy answers.
However, the novel is not without its critics, and these critiques often stem from the very realism Walton strives to achieve. Publishers Weekly praised the work as "impressively ambitious" but leveled significant criticism at Walton's use of sexual violence within the narrative and what they termed a "reductive" portrayal of the Greek gods. This tension between the mythological framework and the gritty reality of human suffering is central to the book's impact. The gods in The Just City are not distant, benevolent figures; they are flawed, obsessive, and often cruel architects of human misery. Athene's pursuit of wisdom comes at the expense of the children she collects. Apollo's quest for understanding requires him to experience the vulnerability and terror of mortality.
Kirkus Reviews offered a similar nuance, suggesting that while the protagonists "have a certain appeal," the novel functions more as a "thought experiment than plot." This observation misses the emotional core of the work, however. The tragedy of Simmea and Kebes is not just a philosophical point; it is a human story of friendship fractured by ideology. The pain of Lukretia is not an allegory for the corruption of power; it is the lived experience of a woman trapped in a system that views her as a political pawn. To dismiss the book as merely a thought experiment is to ignore the blood spilled on the pages.
The sequel, The Philosopher Kings, published just five months later in June 2015, and the trilogy's conclusion, Necessity, arriving in July 2016, expanded on these themes. They explored what happens when a society tries to correct its own errors, only to realize that the pursuit of justice is an endless cycle rather than a destination. The Spanish-language translation, La ciudad justa, was recognized as a finalist for the 2022 Premio Ignotus, a testament to the story's enduring power across cultures and languages.
What makes The Just City so compelling in the context of Jo Walton's broader work, such as her earlier novel Everybody's Perfect (a reference to her exploration of societal norms and the construction of "normalcy"), is its refusal to let the reader off the hook. In Everybody's Perfect, Walton examines how societies enforce conformity; in The Just City, she pushes this inquiry to its absolute limit by constructing a society that explicitly demands total conformity in the name of justice. The characters are not just fighting against external forces; they are fighting against the very logic of their world.
Consider the character of Maia, a young woman from the Victorian era. Her presence introduces a specific historical consciousness about gender and class into the mix. As a Master, she is part of the ruling elite, yet her background in an era defined by rigid social hierarchies forces her to confront the parallels between Victorian England and Plato's Athens. She represents the modern reader's entry point, someone who recognizes the flaws in the system but is bound by its laws. Her interactions with Pytheas highlight the generational and temporal gaps that the experiment tries, and fails, to bridge.
The treatment of slavery in the novel is particularly harrowing and essential to its argument. The children in the Just City are not born into it; they are bought. They are acquired from slave markets throughout history. This is not a metaphorical slavery but a literal one. The Masters justify this by claiming that these children will be raised to freedom, to become philosopher-kings. But for Kebes and Simmea, this justification rings hollow. Their enslavement is the foundational sin of the city. Walton does not shy away from the brutality of their origins or the psychological impact of being told that your oppression is actually a form of liberation. This is where the human cost becomes impossible to ignore.
The narrative structure allows Walton to weave together these disparate threads—the divine, the historical, and the personal—into a cohesive whole. The perspective shifts between Pytheas's intuitive, emotional understanding and the more cerebral, analytical views of figures like Boethius or Plotinus. This variation in voice keeps the prose dynamic, preventing the philosophical discourse from becoming dry or academic.
"More thought experiment than plot."
While this critique from Kirkus suggests a lack of narrative drive, it overlooks the high stakes of the internal drama. The plot is driven by the inevitable clash between the ideal and the real. When Socrates arrives, he acts as a catalyst, forcing every character to choose where they stand. Do they defend the city as it was designed, or do they acknowledge its fundamental injustices? This choice leads to fractures, betrayals, and ultimately, the unraveling of the experiment.
The legacy of The Just City lies in its bravery. It dares to take a text as famous and revered as Plato's Republic and subjects it to the stress test of reality. It asks: if we actually built this society, would it be just? The answer, according to Walton, is a resounding no, not because the people are bad, but because the system itself is incompatible with human nature. The gods may have good intentions, or perhaps they are simply curious, but their experiment results in real suffering for real children.
In an era where discussions of social engineering and political correctness often dominate public discourse, The Just City offers a necessary counter-narrative. It reminds us that the pursuit of perfection can be as destructive as the chaos it seeks to replace. The island of Thera may have been destroyed by a volcano in history, but in Walton's fiction, the city is destroyed from within by the weight of its own contradictions.
The book stands as a monument to the complexity of ethical inquiry. It does not offer a manifesto for a new way of living; instead, it offers a warning. The characters we meet—Simmea, Pytheas, Sokrates, Kebes—are not just literary devices; they are voices that demand to be heard. They remind us that behind every political theory, there are human beings paying the price. Whether one agrees with Walton's conclusion or finds her portrayal of the gods too harsh, the power of The Just City is undeniable. It forces the reader to engage with the hardest questions about justice, freedom, and the cost of building a perfect world.
As readers continue to explore Jo Walton's bibliography, starting perhaps with the themes in Everybody's Perfect, The Just City serves as the deep background, the philosophical bedrock upon which her later explorations rest. It is a book that stays with you long after the final page, echoing the questions of Socrates and the cries of the children on Thera. In 2015, it was hailed as brilliant; years later, its relevance remains undiminished because the questions it asks are ones humanity has yet to answer.