seekingferret | Books That I Have Read Lately and May Not Get to Reviewing

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Books I Recommend

The Just City by Jo Walton

The Scorpion Rules by Erin Bow

C is for Corpse by Sue Grafton

Silas Marner by George Eliot

Books I Don't Recommend

Mars, Inc. by Ben Bova

This Is How I Leave You by Jonathan Trotter

Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes by Neil Gaiman

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

alexseanchai

I am curious your thoughts on The Just City.

From:

seekingferret

Heh. Figuring out what to say about The Just City is the roadblock that's been keeping me from writing up a lot of these other books.

At a first pass, I think it is, like Among Others, a book that is fundamentally about Jo Walton re-examining her childhood dreams from an adult perspective and finding them somewhat wanting, through the lens of a character being magically gifted everything they ever thought they wanted. There is an awful lot of similarity between Maia and Mor. Finding a Karass is a lot more important to me than building the Republic- from that perspective, Among Others is more thematically compelling to me. On the other hand, the Just City is a more complicated novel that does a better job of presenting a lot of different perspectives, and a generally better job of moving the pieces around.

Apollo's presence in the narrative is a very interesting variable. I can't figure out how I feel about it, particularly how Apollo presents truths about divinity. Ada Palmer's argument is that Walton stacks the deck against the Republic's success by constructing a universe where Platonic metaphysics is wrong, which I initially thought was a slightly silly claim since in our universe, Platonic metaphysics is plainly not based in empiricism and the only way to recover any kind of reasonable government out of the Republic is to introduce alternate sources of truth besides Platonic intuition about the Good. But thinking about Apollo's place in the narrative- Apollo provides empirical confirmation of metaphysical ideas that are not empirically confirmed in our universe, so Walton just as easily COULD have created a narrative in which Platonic metaphysis is true, where the Apollonic figure is more like Aslan, say, than Mahasamatman. It's interesting to ask why she didn't, why she was interested in this particular version of Apollo and Pallas Athena asking these questions.

Heh, but those are just first pass thoughts. I'm still chewing.

From:

alexseanchai

Hah, oops. Sorry.

Intrigued! But I haven't read much of Walton's other work, certainly not the one you reference here, so half of it doesn't make sense to me. Oh well. Am I to take it that you recommend Among Others?

Apollo is doubly intriguing once you've read The Philosopher Kings, imo.

From:

seekingferret

Not sure if I'd recommend Among Others. Here's the slightly more detailed review: http://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/157859.html

From:

jack

Oh! Palmer's essay is absolutely fascinating. I need to read some more things *about* Just City, because I was really interested, but suspect a lot went over my head if I didn't know anything else about the history. I know almost nothing about the other historical characters for instance.

I'm not sure about the metaphysical conclusions though. On the one hand, it seems like, based on the essay's description, criticising the underlying philosophy is exactly HOW Just City is criticising the Republic.

On the other hand, it seems like, even if all philosophies don't ultimately converge, if you aim for a just city where, eg. "everyone is generally happy", "everyone has enough food and shelter", "everyone makes progress at philosophical research", and "no-one leads a rebellion against the gods, leading to a completely breakdown into warring factions", you could have considerably more success than they actually did, by looking at what's likely to work and what isn't, that people from reasonably divergent backgrounds might agree on in principle, but they failed to actually find that agreement in the book because they didn't reevaluate Plato enough.

On a third hand, you might say that's what's important about the Republic is that it's TRYING to achieve a completely egalitarian yet functioning society, and the best implementation is to try to fulfil that goal, even if you have a different starting point, better in some ways and worse in others.

From:

jack

I don't have anywhere to go with this thought, but the comments about seeking a single, universal truth DID remind me of Athena/Apollo's description of different religion in the Just City, that they were all different reflections of one central God-like centre. So maybe Just City DOES have an underlying universal truth, they just didn't find it (although I don't think so).