Lunchtime Must Read: Cory Doctorow: Jo Walton’s “The Just City”

…has heard the prayers of all her worshipers through the ages who have read Plato’s Republic…. So she summons them all to a volcanic island… doomed to be lost to eruption… ensuring that her tampering… will not unduly disrupt the future, which will only dimly remember the island as Atlantis. In this place, men and women from all times and places set to making a place for the children whom they will raise to be philosopher kings…. The children of the Just City are then inducted into the Platonic system of education and indoctrination. And here is where Walton shines… the small and hurtful and glorious business of interpersonal relationships… the incredible beauty and the cruelty of utopian projects. Nobody writes like Walton. The Just City manages to both sympathize with social engineering at the same time as it demolishes paternalistic solutions to human problems. In so doing, this book about philosophy, history, gender and freedom also manages to be a spectacular coming-of-age tale that encompasses everything from courtroom dramas to sexual intrigue…

…seems to me an idea that is so obvious everyone should have had it, that it should be a subgenre, there should be versions written by Diderot and George Eliot and Orwell and H. Beam Piper and Octavia Butler. Of course, it simultaneously seems like a crazy idea that makes people roll their eyes when I describe it. It’s about Greek gods and time travellers setting up Plato’s Republic, on Thera before it erupted, with robots and Socrates and ten thousand children, and it all goes just as well as you might expect… and the other thing I can say about it is that it’s about love and excellence…