The Just City cover art

The Just City

Thessaly, Book 1

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The Just City

By: Jo Walton
Narrated by: Noah Michael Levine
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About this listen

"Here in the Just City, you will become your best selves. You will learn and grow and strive to be excellent."

Created as an experiment by the time-traveling goddess Pallas Athene, the Just City is a planned community populated by over 10,000 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 AD 500 and AD 1000, 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 gray-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.

©2014 Jo Walton (P)2016 Audible, Inc.
Classics Fantasy Fiction Literary Fiction Science Fiction Time Travel City Robotics

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A good effort

I was interested in reading this book to see an interpretation of Plato's Republic. I thought it would be good to see how someone would write about it having studied it and thought through the meaning. I wasn't disappointed, but certainly didn't agree with some aspects. eg. Suggesting that Plato 'got it wrong' and putting that into the mouth of Socrates; treating the gods as human - a bit on the edge there; and emphasis on 'rhetoric' when I'm sure that Socrates would never teach or engage in 'rhetoric'. He was a dialectician through and through. Any rhetoric he practised would be just by the way. I guess you could call his Apology 'rhetoric', but it was dialectic that we look to learn from him. I'm thinking about reading the other two in the trilogy. For the same reason I read this one - what will the author do with it?

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