The Just City

Apart from the time-travelling, the possibly sentient robots and gods and goddesses, not much sci-fi or fantasy here, but plenty of philosophy, melodrama and a little sexual violence. Jo Walton continues to pursue excellence in writing in this thought experiment of realising the Just City of Plato. To be honest, the ideals of the Just City are a bit shit and demonstrate once again why we shouldn't slavishly follows ideas from the Bronze and Iron Ages. Perhaps Walton subtly alludes to this with the demographic and centuries of origin of the Masters. Nevertheless, this is a thoroughly engaging and thought-provoking read, and you may ask yourself the question enunciated by Simmea that appears as the title of this review. Why indeed, eh? I look forward to reading the next book in the series and I hope we see more of the workers.

Considering that these "finest minds" mostly come from an era where slavery is not a problem, and that Plato's ideas on personal relationships—as logical as they might be—have nothing to do with how humans relate to each other, well, the experiment would be interesting to watch.

Jo Walton pushes the thought experiment by giving us well written characters, a fantastic setting (Atlantis was real!) and sci-fi musings (do robots have souls?), and uses the rules of the experiment to make us question it (thanks, Sokrates).

I really enjoyed this book, but I'll wait a couple of weeks at least before opening the second volume of the series—I don't want to burn out on it.