The Just City
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- € 3,99
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- € 3,99
Beschrijving uitgever
'Here in the Just City you will become your best selves. You will learn and grow and strive to be excellent.'
One day, in a moment of philosophical puckishness, the time-travelling goddess Pallas Athene decides to put Plato to the test and create the Just City. She locates the City on a Mediterranean island and populates it with over ten thousand children and a few hundred adults from all eras of history . . . along with some handy robots from the far human future.
Meanwhile, Apollo - stunned by the realization that there are things that human beings understand better than he does - has decided to become a mortal child, head to Athene's City and see what all the fuss is about.
Then Socrates arrives, and starts asking troublesome questions.
What happens next is a tale only the brilliant Jo Walton could tell.
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Hugo-winner Walton (My Real Children) explores the temptations and pitfalls of utopia in a genre-bending thought experiment: what if the Greek gods recreated Plato's Republic with human time travelers? Centuries before the Trojan War, on the volcanic island of Thera, the goddess Athene presides over the Just City, where her devotees from throughout history strive to raise a generation of philosopher-kings. When Sokrates of Athens arrives, as ever a thorn in the side of the establishment, the consequences are far-reaching and explosive. Perspectives alternate among the passionately intellectual Egyptian-born Simmea; the formerly Victorian Maia, one of the city's first "masters"; and the reincarnated god Apollo, who's on a quest to learn about "equal significance and volition." Walton expertly observes the cracks between Platonic ideal and messy reality, but she relies heavily and uncomfortably on sexual violence and its aftermath as vehicles for exploring concepts of consent and free will. Her reductive depiction of the gods particularly callous, unkind Athene, who's set up as a straw man for Sokrates to knock down and an unresolved, abrupt ending prevent this impressively ambitious novel from becoming its own best self.
