Found this on my e-reader (I must have got it free somewhere?) and remembered that I liked Jo Walton, so I might as well read it.

The premise is weird, but I promise it's interesting. In the notes, Walton says she was fifteen when she had an idea about time travelers setting up the Just City from Plato's Republic in Atlantis, but couldn't have pulled it off until now.

I wouldn't have been one of the people who prayed to Athene to live in the Just City, and I like Athene's (Walton's) explanation: the difference between times where we believe in attaining perfection and the times where we believe in progress. I was torn about whether to shelve this as queer; there are lots of side-mentions of bi- and homosexuality, but not any of the main characters and not as a central concern. (SO MANY HISTORICAL LESBIANS THO. IF THERE IS NO FANFIC I WILL BE DISAPPOINTED IN THE INTERNET.) The gender binary is strong in this one.

Apollo decides he needs to live as a human for a lifetime to understand equal significance and volition, and sexism and slavery are two of the foundational cracks with which the city struggles most profoundly. I might have more thoughts about this later, but Walton's treatment of both was good.

Klio's supposed to be from our near future, but she reads more like a 70s or 80s feminist. Does she not quite grok rape culture, or is she purposely giving a less-enlightened response to a date rape that takes place in the book because they're surrounded by a bunch of powerful dudes from the middle ages and antiquity and she's just being practical? (Ugh, what a time for a philosopher to choose practicality.) Both make her look bad, but her response makes more sense from a pre-2000s feminist. ( )

So many books make me think I would enjoy living in classical Greece, and this is among them. I enjoyed the premise and the characters. But much more than those I appreciated Walton's weaving real philosophy into the story. To do so without wrecking the story takes immense skill. But she pulls it off seamlessly. I am likely to raise the rating on this book to five stars if I re-read it. ( )

Unfortunately a squandered premise ( )

A really interesting experiment of a book about a really interesting experiment - very thought provoking ( )

3.5. The Just City is a thought experiment about a thought experiment - what if an anachronistic band of philosophers, numerologists, and classics nerds traveled through time to found Plato's Republic on the island of Atlantis? You can't ask for a better premise than that.

The Just City was good fun for the first couple hundred pages, walking the line between utopian and dystopian fiction to tell a smart, memorable story about the ethics of social change and the nature of happiness.

However, the last act or so didn't delight me the way the beginning did. The narrative lost its tension, and the metaphysics of Walton's world stopped working for me.

I should explain that I am a very bad reader of fantasy fiction when it comes to metaphysics. I am a hopeless materialist and when fantasy worlds start making metaphysical claims that aren't true in our world, I find it easy to feel alienated as a reader. (An example that readers might recognize comes from Gaiman's A Game of You, when Wanda is excluded from female magic because she's not biologically female. I love A Game of You, but I think it's an odd choice to make Sandman's gods reinforce a gender essentialism that in our world is purely cultural.)

So I am all for reading about a world where the Greek gods and reincarnation are real, but Walton lost me when she made these facts central to the characters' philosophical dialogues. Maybe I am missing some subtlety of what she was trying to accomplish, but since the book lost me narratively as well, I'm probably not going to reread to figure out what I missed. ( )