The Just City

The Just City is a fantasy novel by Jo Walton. First published in 2015, the book exposes the problems with philosophical teachings when they’re applied to real situations. Specifically, in The Just City, Walton focuses on Plato’s ideas of justice. The book, which is the first in the Thessaly series, received nominations for both the 2016 Prometheus Award and the 2017 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature. Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. Her 2011 novel, Among Others, is one of only a few books to receive Hugo Award, Nebula Award, and World Fantasy Award nominations.

The book takes place in a fictional community called the Just City. The Just City is modeled on a Mediterranean island from ancient times, and it’s led by a goddess called Pallas Athene. Pallas dreams of building her own utopia. She believes that it’s possible for humanity to coexist peacefully forever.

Unsurprisingly, when humanity hears about the Just City, everyone wants to stay there. However, to give her world the best possible start, Pallas must travel across time and find the right people to populate the Just City. She begins by looking at her own worshippers. She finds two young women who appeal to her. One worshipper is a Victorian woman called Ethel. She’s on a trip to Rome when she prays to Pallas for help finding her life’s purpose.



The other worshipper is a girl called Simmea. She’s a farmer’s daughter who lived around 1000 AD. She loves learning, and she prays to Pallas for a chance at living on the island. Pallas thinks she’ll make a great teacher one day and so she pulls her forward in time and introduces her to the Just City.

Pallas fills the city with others just like Simmea, and Ethel, who is now called Maia. She chooses thousands of children from a slave market because they all want a better life. She jumps back and forward in time and chooses great dreamers and philosophers. She also sources nurturing teachers and elders to look after the children.

Her hope is that, one day, some of the children will become Philosopher Kings. These Kings can take humanity to its next level because they understand what Truth is. They can ensure that the Just City never forgets its goal, which is the pursuit of pure, divine, uncorrupted Truth. This idea is in keeping with Plato’s own ideas of perfect justice.



Not all the gods, however, believe in Pallas’s experiment. Some don’t care about humanity and think that Pallas is wasting her time. Others think she has no business meddling in human affairs, because people must learn to live harmoniously on their own. The so-called “ideal” world can’t possibly coexist with the “real” world. More specifically, there is one god who is determined to disrupt Pallas’s experiment. His name is Apollo.

Apollo takes on a human disguise and enters the Just City. Pallas doesn’t notice him because she’s too busy working on her Philosopher Kings. What Apollo learns shocks him. Not everyone in the Just City had a choice about living there. For example, although Pallas liberated children from slave markets, she didn’t give them a choice about where they could stay. She simply uprooted them and made them live in the Just City.

Apollo doesn’t react at first. He bides his time and waits for the right moment to ruin the Just City. What he doesn’t expect, however, is to fall in love with Simmea. She shows him how wonderful mortal women can be, and he doesn’t want to let her go. He eventually reveals his true heritage because he can’t deceive her any longer. She agrees to keep his god status a secret because she loves him, too.



Meanwhile, Pallas sits back and watches everything unfold. Her scholars and teachers build replicas of ancient Greek houses, sleeping quarters, and farms. Robots work on the land and undertake the heaviest work. The children don’t notice their lack of freedom because life here is better than life as a slave. The elders set up various committees for handling the day-to-day running of the Just City.

Everything changes when the children grow up. Pallas and the committees expect the young men and women to procreate. They pair couples off and marriage is strongly encouraged. Plato teaches that marriage, or unity, is everything. However, despite getting married, the men and women sleep with other people. Children born out of wedlock are commonplace and they live in communal nurseries.

The Just City reaches a breaking point when a philosopher called Sokrates arrives. He’s known for questioning everything, and he’s very sceptical of the city. He teaches Simmea and the others to question what Pallas and the committees tell them. It’s not long before the people demand a choice in how they live their lives, and Pallas’s experiment fails.



Meanwhile, everyone soon realizes that the robots laboring on the farms are sentient, and without them, nothing gets done. The robots demand more rights and now there truly is justice in Pallas’s Just City.