2015 read #6: The Just City by Jo Walton.

The Just City by Jo Walton
368 pages
Published 2015
Read from January 31 to February 7
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

Content warning: Discussion of rape depicted in the book.

My first exposure to Plato was the PHI 101 course I took during my first semester as an undergrad. The professor was dynamic and engaging, but his weakness, appropriately enough, was for philosophical debate. Plato (and by proxy Socrates), together with the rest of the Classical Greek philosophers, was only supposed to occupy the first three weeks of the course, but Professor C. let the class get out of hand in their enthusiasm for going for Plato's jugular. Six weeks into the course -- almost halfway through the semester -- students were still standing up in the lecture hall to expostulate on Plato's errors and why he was just plain wrong about something. I was new to the classroom experience, and certainly contributed my share of derailment -- I thought I had a brilliant response to the question of whether any thinking being might choose the bad over the good, but found myself lost in a completely irrelevant (and public) description of my depression -- but even at the time I understood that there was no reason to argue so vehemently against Plato, because arguing against Plato is literally the history of the rest of Western philosophy, so we only had to wait for Professor C. to get around to teaching us the arguments that had already been made. Unfortunately, we spent so much time arguing with Plato ourselves that Professor C. had to cut substantial portions of the syllabus to get back on track; we never covered anything later than Nietzsche and William James, and we only touched on them because Professor C. had a fondness for James and used him for the capping lecture at the end of the term.

In all those endless weeks of undergrads pwning Plato, we never read a word of the Republic. We read selections from Crito, Phaedo, Meno, and possibly another dialogue, but the Republic was a chunk of our greatest-hits-of-philosophy reader that we never touched. I regret the spotty nature of my philosophical education, but until now I hadn't thought I'd missed much by not reading an additional Platonic dialogue -- it was that stuff that Professor C. had to cut to make room for all our Plato hate, everything in between the Stoics and Descartes, and again between Descartes and Nietzsche, and again after James, that I wish I'd learned. But when I heard that Jo Walton, one of my favorite authors, was about to publish a two-book science fantasy about Greek gods and the establishment of Plato's Just City, I counted down the days until my library's copy of the first book would arrive.

Walton says the idea of writing a novel about time travelers establishing the Just City occurred to her way back when she was 15, which makes all the dinosaur novels and Star Wars fan-fiction I was writing at 15 seem pretty silly. But whatever her original idea had been, she uses the trope of the Just City to explore, on multiple levels, issues of consent, autonomy, and the equal significance of persons. (Incidentally, I just used the word "trope" correctly, for perhaps the first time in the history of the internet. Suck it, TV Tropes. You changed the meaning of a perfectly good word, and frankly you aren't that interesting a website.) Unfortunately, as the god Apollo, incarnate as a young man named Pytheas in order to learn about these topics for himself, admits, "Explaining [these issues] to humans wouldn't be possible. I could try to inspire people to make art about it. Poems. Sculptures. But it's one of those things that doesn't go easily into the shapes of stories."

Consent, autonomy, and equal significance are vital issues, and throughout the book, one gets the sense that Walton is trying to do a public service in creating a science fantasy book (the sort of book, presumably, 15 year old Jo would have loved to read) that addresses them in a sensitive but direct and unswerving manner, a didactic correction to all those horrid genre books full of casual rape and misogyny. It makes for stiff and artificial reading at times. A scene in which one of the time-traveling masters of the city is raped by another is carefully written to demonstrate that arousal is not a token of consent, and to show how poisonous and predatory the idea of "But she really wanted it" is, but the dialogue between rapist and woman is as naturalistic as an undergraduate gender studies essay. I'd rather these issues be explored in any way possible, naturalism be damned, but I agree with the words Walton put in Apollo's mouth: it doesn't go easily into stories. It's important that authors address these issues, but The Just City shows that the art of explaining consent and equal significance is still in an awkward, fumbling phase. In time, I'm sure, genre authors will have a better grasp of how to discuss autonomy and consent (for all I know literary authors figured this out long ago). The Just City is an important step in that direction, but as art, I'd hardly call it inspired.