The Just City

Readers of Plato will be familiar with his Just City from his work The Republic.  In her own The Just City, Jo Walton imagines Athena and Apollo joining together to create an experimental version of that city on a volcanic island in prehistory Earth.  They people it with masters drawn from people across all time who prayed to Athena for the existence of just such a city and with 10 year old children who were sold as slaves.  The goal is to see if Plato’s just city is achievable.    The book switches viewpoints between a number of different characters, both children & masters as it traces the progress of this experiment and details what happened.

The book is interesting even if you are completely unfamiliar with Plato.  I would recommend it to reader’s who like utopian (but not really) stories, people of a philosophical bent looking to explore a concept fictionally, and anyone who likes a different story.