The Just City
Created as an experiment by the time-traveling goddess Pallas Athene, the Just City is a planned community, populated by over ten thousand children and a few hundred adult teachers from all eras of history, along with some handy robots from the far human future - all set down together on a Mediterranean island in the distant past. The student Simmea, born an Egyptian farmer's daughter sometime between 500 and 1000 A.D, is a brilliant child, eager for knowledge, ready to strive to be her best self. The teacher Maia was once Ethel, a young Victorian lady of much learning and few prospects, who prayed to Pallas Athene in an unguarded moment during a trip to Rome - and, in an instant, found herself in the Just City with grey-eyed Athene standing unmistakably before her. Meanwhile, Apollo - stunned by the realization that there are things mortals understand better than he does - has arranged to live a human life, and has come to the City as one of the children. He knows his true identity, and conceals it from his peers. For this lifetime, he is prone to all the troubles of being human. Then, a few years in, Sokrates arrives - the same Sokrates recorded by Plato himself - to ask all the troublesome questions you would expect. What happens next is a tale only the brilliant Jo Walton could tell.--Provided by publisher.
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What Hacker News says
- Jo Walton - The Just City. It's SFF, but there's a lot of meditation of living your best life and equal significance.
- > Margaret Atwood furiously resists the idea that her stuff is Science Fiction because "SF is talking squids in outer space".
It was a little more nuanced than that. Her argument was that The Handmaid's Tale wasn't really science fiction because it was set in a dystopian "now". Recall there wasn't anything particularly advanced about the technology in the story and its timeline forked from ours sometime in the 1970s (the book took place in the 1980s I think). She instead preferred if the story were called "speculative fiction".
While some of that could rightly be attributed to not wanting to be shelved as science fiction, that's also not the full story. Pre-internet, Margaret Atwood's audience was primarily a literary audience. So it makes sense that she'd want this new book to be shelved in the same place her old books were shelved. Otherwise she might lose out on some of her core audience.
Atwood being a repeat offender of looting "the treasury of SF ideas" is baseless hyperbole, and your entire rant falls on a throwaway comment she made 30 years ago. She looted the "treasury of SF ideas" in the same way Delany looted Moby Dick to write Nova or Jo Walton looted Greek myth to write The Just City
- You might like The Just City, by Jo Walton. I was kind of ambivalent about it, but it was a reasonably fun speculative fiction about Athena gathering people from throughout time to recreate the city that Plato laid out in Republic.
To make that possible, she provides robots which can understand basic instructions and act semi-autonomously to build things, farm, etc, but fall well short of actual sapience. And after awhile, she introduces a gadfly named Socrates into the fledgling city.
