Jo Walton's The Just City

[calimac]

Today 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.

Comments

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I had the same problem with being unable to differentiate between voices. I was constantly reading Maia and thinking, "What an odd thing for Simmea to say." In fact, I honestly thought Simmea was the one who went with Ikaros that one time and found it not very different from the time with Kebes. I do like the book very much. I've never had trouble with character differentiation before in her novels. They absolutely tend to sound like her own voice in this book. But I liked that.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

That issue of informed consent makes perfect sense to me. The whole point of the novel is about informed consent and the problems the gods have with it, starting with Apollo's attempted rape of Daphne. One of the purposes of the Just City is to explore the nature of informed consent; but the exploration is being done by entities that really don't understand informed consent. And they're trying to gain an understanding of it from Plato, who doesn't really understand it either, as his whole theory of the noble lie makes clear. So it's no wonder the whole thing blows up in their faces. It seems to me that the lack of informed consent isn't a flaw in the writing but a tragic flaw in the gods themselves.

Incidentally, I didn't find the discussion in the middle numbing, because it was making an important plot point: That having the numbers of children in the different groups turn out as they did was not something that could be expected to happen by sheer chance, and therefore was evidence that the teachers were manipulating things behind the scenes, in a way that anyone who understood mathematics had a chance to spot, precisely by paying attention to the numerical details. That struck me as a nice piece of irony.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I agree with the issue of informed consent being a flaw within the story rather than one in the author's writing of it, but I can also appreciate the perspective of someone like Amy who finds the whole concept so repelling that she can't deal with a story that includes it.

But I'm just the opposite on the other matter. Yes, absolutely, the plot point that the numbers didn't arise by chance was important, but the discussion of the arithmetic of it went on and on long after that was clear. That's what made it numbing. If I'd been reading a physical copy I'd have started skimming. Unfortunately you can't really skim on an e-reader.