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Jo Walton's The Just City
Jun. 14th, 2015 08:41 pmToday our Mythopoeic Society group met to discuss Jo Walton's The Just City, chosen because she'll be Guest of Honor at Mythcon. We had a large turnout and everybody, it seemed, had read the book, including me.
Not that I'd thought a novel about people trying to build from the plan of Plato's Republic would be very appealing or interesting. I've read only a few bits of Plato and did not like the taste. But this was Jo Walton. If anybody could make this unappetizing program interesting, she could.
And did. I found it fascinating, for the most part, provocative and interesting. Most of the rest liked it too.
That said, I had some problems with it: I wouldn't be me if I didn't. The main problem was that the characters weren't distinctive. When I picked up the book after a break, it was hard to tell if I was in a chapter narrated by Maia or one by Simmea. When the characters sat around discussing philosophy, they had a single voice, and that voice was identical with that of Jo Walton's book reviews on Tor.com.
As with so many novels, there was a slack section in the middle while the characters sit around waiting for the rest of the plot to show up. Much of this was spent in numbing discussion of the exact number of gold, silver, etc. medalists among the city's children. I was reminded of the equivalent section of The King's Peace which is filled with military organizational charts.
Fortunately that didn't last long, and the final climax, while a bit abrupt, was well prepared for, and perfectly filled the need to finish this book satisfactorily while leaving the door wide open for the sequel.
The philosophical questions, those of free will and of slavery, did not bother me on a level of enjoying the book. I felt they were part of the set-up. At first, the question of whether the robot workers are conscious seemed arbitrarily raised, but during the discussion I realized this was a necessary extrapolation of the initial situation. The City cannot exist without slaves, so rather than pollute it with the repellent distraction of human chattel slavery, create the workers, and then raise the question of whether they are slaves.
As for the workers themselves, I kept picturing them as looking like the Imperial Walkers from Star Wars, though it's clear they do not, and their opening of dialogue reminded me obliquely of the Cobae from George Alec Effinger's "From Downtown at the Buzzer."
But one reader, Amy W., couldn't even get past the issue of the children brought to populate the city. She's a scientist, and the idea of an experiment run on people without their informed consent was too alarming for her.
Not that I'd thought a novel about people trying to build from the plan of Plato's Republic would be very appealing or interesting. I've read only a few bits of Plato and did not like the taste. But this was Jo Walton. If anybody could make this unappetizing program interesting, she could.
And did. I found it fascinating, for the most part, provocative and interesting. Most of the rest liked it too.
That said, I had some problems with it: I wouldn't be me if I didn't. The main problem was that the characters weren't distinctive. When I picked up the book after a break, it was hard to tell if I was in a chapter narrated by Maia or one by Simmea. When the characters sat around discussing philosophy, they had a single voice, and that voice was identical with that of Jo Walton's book reviews on Tor.com.
As with so many novels, there was a slack section in the middle while the characters sit around waiting for the rest of the plot to show up. Much of this was spent in numbing discussion of the exact number of gold, silver, etc. medalists among the city's children. I was reminded of the equivalent section of The King's Peace which is filled with military organizational charts.
Fortunately that didn't last long, and the final climax, while a bit abrupt, was well prepared for, and perfectly filled the need to finish this book satisfactorily while leaving the door wide open for the sequel.
The philosophical questions, those of free will and of slavery, did not bother me on a level of enjoying the book. I felt they were part of the set-up. At first, the question of whether the robot workers are conscious seemed arbitrarily raised, but during the discussion I realized this was a necessary extrapolation of the initial situation. The City cannot exist without slaves, so rather than pollute it with the repellent distraction of human chattel slavery, create the workers, and then raise the question of whether they are slaves.
As for the workers themselves, I kept picturing them as looking like the Imperial Walkers from Star Wars, though it's clear they do not, and their opening of dialogue reminded me obliquely of the Cobae from George Alec Effinger's "From Downtown at the Buzzer."
But one reader, Amy W., couldn't even get past the issue of the children brought to populate the city. She's a scientist, and the idea of an experiment run on people without their informed consent was too alarming for her.
