Jo Walton: The Just City

Jo Walton is a fearless writer, which is part of what I love about her work. She's willing to experiment, to explore new themes and subjects and styles, to reinvent herself almost every time she begins a new project.

In The Just City - the first volume of the Thessaly trilogy - Walton combines Greek gods, robots, some judicious time travel, a thought experiment that brings together some of the greatest philosophers in the history of European civilisation and an extensive critique of Plato's The Republic to create a novel that is as narratively compelling as it is thought provoking.

The story begins with Apollo and Athena. Apollo is confused because his latest sexual adventure has ended, not in the enthusiastic compliance he believes all his previous advances have evokes, but in the desperate prayer of his quarry to be transformed into a tree rather than submit to his embrace. Unable to fathom why Daphne would rather give up her life as a nereid than give in to his desires, he seeks out his sister Athena, who tells him: "But she hadn’t chosen you in return. It wasn’t mutual. You decided to pursue her. You didn’t ask, and she certainly didn’t agree. It wasn’t consensual. And, as it happens, she didn’t want you. So she turned into a tree.”

Apollo grasps this at an intellectual level, but fails to fully comprehend the concepts of volition and equal significance behind Athena's explanation. He considers incarnating as human in order to explore the matter as a human. Athena suggests that he take part in her experiment - she is in the middle of creating a city based on Plato's The Republic. He agrees.

It turns out that Athena has drawn together around 300 scholars from many time periods, all of whom have at one point in their lives prayed in her name for the realisation of The Republic. Assisted by highly developed worker robots Athena has brought from the future, these "masters" have worked for five years to plan and build a city, situated well in the past on the volcanic island of Kallisti (and later, after the explosion that destroyed half of it, Thera), that would operate on the principles laid out by Plato. When all is ready, the masters are sent out into various time periods to purchase 10,000 ten-year old slaves to be the experimental population. Apollo arranges to be born as human at a tine and place where he will be one of these children.

As the experiment proceeds, we see what works - and what does not - through the eyes of three people: Apollo, now known as Pytheas; Simmea, another of the children who becomes a friend of Pytheas; and Maia, a master from the 18th century who was drawn to The Republic because of Plato's inclusion of women as full participants in his imagined society, capable of being philosopher-kings.

Indeed, as Walton explores the importance of volition and equal significant in the quest to create a truly just society, the issue of gendered justice and free choice in sex and reproduction becomes an important part of the conversation that runs through the novel. Slavery, misogyny, sexual violence, exploitation, the essence of sentience - all these are a part of the examination of freedom and justice that is the heart of The Just City.

I know it has had some mixed reviews, but for me The Just City was one of those books I couldn't put down until I finished it.

Jo Walton: The Philosopher Kings

The second book in Jo Walton's Thessaly trilogy, The Philosopher Kings, is in many ways an inversion of The Just City. Instead of asking questions, it proposes answers. Instead of trying to build the just society of Plato's Republic, it details the shattering of that singleminded goal into a multitude of separate factions, each imagining itself to be the proper way to bring about justice and excellence. Instead of hope and progress, it deals with loss and discord.

Apollo and Maia continue to be key narrative voices, but the death of Simmea brings to the forefront a new character, Arete, the semi-divine daughter of Apollo and Simmea.

The core questions are still the same - what is just, what is the good life, what is excellence, what is personal responsibility, and what is purpose of life. But where in the previous novel, the characters sought their answers to these questions within the framework of Plato's ideal, here they find personal answers in their interrogation, re-examination and alteration of the ideal. The Just City was idealistic theory, The Philosopher Kings is personal praxis.

And just as The Just City ended in a debate that prompted the action of a god and the changing of everything that had gone before, The Philosopher Kings ends much the same way, promising a conclusion as different and original as the two volumes that preceded it.

Usman Malik: The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn

Usman Malik's fantasy novella, The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn, is a wondrous and lyrical tale about finding the balance between history and myth, past and present, the world of scholarship and science and that of artistry and spirit. It is about discovering and owning one's heritage, about family and mystery and memory.

The protagonist is Salman Ali Zaidi, a Pakistani-American university lecturer, "... the archetypal fucking immigrant in the land of opportunities" who has distanced himself from his roots in order to find a place in the new world, only to realise that he is adrift, "... a twenty-eight-year-old brown man living in a shitty apartment, doing a shitty job that doesn’t pay much and has no hope of tenure."

As a young boy, he had listened to his grandfather's romantic tales of dethroned Mughal princesses running tea shops and guardian jinn dwelling in trees, fascinated but disbelieving. But on his grandfather's death, he begins reading the old man's books, papers and journal, and begins a quest for the truth of his grandfather's past that will take him into the heart of Islamic mysticism and unveil his grandfather's startling legacy - and give him both his roots, and his future.

A complex, beautifully crafted story that swept me up and would not let me go.