The Just City
by Jo Walton · first published 2001
3mentions
1recommended by
3HN commenters
2017–2018first – last mentioned
33% recommend67% neutral
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
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Jo Walton - The Just City. It's SFF, but there's a lot of meditation of living your best life and equal significance.
on “Ask HN: Which books have made you introspect?” ↗…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
on “Dark Futures: What happens when literary novelists experiment with Sci-Fi” ↗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.…
on “Post office stamps as currency (1862)” ↗