A non-pony recommendation: Jo Walton's Thessaly · 4:06am Oct 25th, 2016

Note: collateral to the story discussed here, I was drawn into some of the online offerings of historian Ada Palmer. Consider this also a recommendation of her stuff, staring with her series on what led to Machiavelli writing The Prince and in the process inventing modern political science and consequentialist ethics, her "Sketches of a History of Historical Skepticism," and her hilarious take on Marvel's "Thor," "Avengers," "Iron Man 3," and "Thor 2." She's consistently both entertaining and informative, and her prose is not only enjoyable to read but exudes passion for her subjects.

Chapter heading: Apollo
She turned into a tree. It was a Mystery. It must have been. Nothing else made sense, because I didn’t understand it.

This is the opening to The Just City, the first novel of Jo Walton’s Thessaly trilogy, and a what a powerful start it is. The first two sentences, short, simple, declarative, raise inherently interesting questions (Who? How? Why?), and transition into defining the character of the god Apollo with a mix of arrogance and a germ of uncertainty through the contrast between “It was a mystery” and “It must have been.”

And from there I was hooked.

This isn’t just the story of Apollo discovering why Daphne would choose to become a tree rather than submit to his advances, or learning any discrete thing about humanity. That’s what draws one of the viewpoint characters into the books, one of the protagonists into the plot, but there’s much more there than that.

Let’s back up a bit.

All the way to Plato.

One of Plato’s famous dialogues was Republic, in which Socrates and his interlocutors discussed the nature of justice, along the way using in an imagined city that would be governed so as to maximize justice to illustrate the concept at a scale more tractable to understanding than within an individual. It was never meant to be created in the real world, but what if it was?

That sits at the foundation of the Thessaly trilogy: what would happen if a bunch of Platonist philosophers and classicists from throughout history were gathered together on an island with some robots by a god, and went about creating Plato’s Republic? How would they implement it, how to fill in the gaps, who would end up being the citizens, will it work out? (I should note I read Republic as preparation for the series, but in retrospect don’t think it was necessary, only advantageous. The concepts brought in are generally covered within the novels themselves, and I never felt lost when ideas from Platonic dialogues I hadn’t read were used, and although some viewpoint characters know the contents, not all do.)

The Just City focuses most strongly on these questions, but it remains a central factor in the second novel, The Philosopher Kings before largely taking a back seat in the last, Necessity. TJC follows the god Apollo (of course) incarnated as the human boy Pytheas, with his subjective-time memory intact but no godly powers (mostly, there are a couple of what seem to be narrow exceptions); Simmea (renamed after the philosopher), an Alexandrian Copt girl born Lucia and raised Christian before being captured by slavers and sold to the Masters at the age of eleven; and Maia, born Ethel, who was denied her desire of living the life of the mind due to being a woman in Victorian England before praying to Athene to live in the city of Plato’s Republic and being snatched from her own time to the pre-Homeric Mediterranean to become one of the Masters of the Just City.

Each brings their own unique perspective to the narrative, and allow for the first-person exploration of ideas, events, and relationships in a much broader way than would be possible with a single viewpoint character or anything but the first person retrospective mode. In addition there are the more surface-level advantage of keeping the camera on the interesting parts without requiring narrative conveniences to keep the right people where they need to be to see them, and the ability to jump around chronologically so that there’s a consecutiveness of theme, using past events to give context to present, rather than just time. The latter is done mainly by jumping from an Apollo or Simmea chapter to a Maia chapter set during the time before the Children were brought to the island the City was built on.

Now, two potential sticking points kind of go in opposite directions on this front. The characters are both too easily relatable and too foreign. On the first, I’ve seen criticism that they sometimes seem more late 20th/early 21st century than uniquely sticking to what you might expect from their respective home times and locations; I saw a bit of this, perhaps, but never found it too distracting both because some is bound to happen and I don’t know the ancient Mediterranean or Renaissance Italy that well anyway, and for the second potential sticking point. That one is something I actually found to be a strength of the series (especially the first two books), and is that the characters don’t think like typical people. The Masters are all Platonists, and of course Apollo is just learning to be human, and hasn’t forgotten what it’s like to be a god. The children are raised from the age of ten to be Platonic philosophers, and the non-Master viewpoint characters (including Apollo) are considered among the greatest successes of the City in raising philosophical minds, which notably included a great deal of emotional distance. Example: people mostly going along with the controlled random one-day marriage festivals for procreation as prescribed in the Republic, despite that being pretty contrary to how people normally act in the real world, or giving up all their babies to be raised anonymously in communal creches.* These aren’t normal people, and I can understand that being a problem for readers who want something more grounded in thinking seen in our world. Because that wasn’t what I wanted out of the series, I was fine with this aspect, and would consider it instead one of its successes.

The two most important characters remaining are Socrates and Kebes. Socrates is the gadfly of Athens, brought to the City against his will just before he was going to die of hemlock poisoning. Kebes is a Child like Simmea (born Matthias, raised Christian), but where she quickly embraces the Just City as her home and as offering a life quite possibly better than what hers would have been otherwise, he does not, instead seeing it as his imprisoner and oppressor. Despite this tension, their friendship from the day they meet is one of the defining relationships of the series.

Along the way the story grapples with issues ranging from the nature of consent and the “equal significance” of people to how to whether robots are people, the nature of gods and men, aspects of love, and more.

I’ll break here to say that I highly recommend The Just City to anyone who liked the hook or finds the basic idea at all interesting. Great writing, characters, and a story that’s consistently engaging despite revolving primarily around talking and ideas rather than more concrete events make it very worth reading, and there are spoilers for it ahead as I move into discussion of the latter two novels.

The Philosopher Kings and Necessity were both interesting and engaging, for the virtues of The Just City held up, but I was rarely quite as strongly attached. The focus had changed from almost entirely on the Just City—now split in five on the original island, plus a break-off faction led off the island by Kebes which hasn’t been heard from since the events at the end of TJC, some couple of decades past—to the interaction it has with the world around it, and much heavier attention on traditional plot (revenge) and godhood and the heroic natures of the children of Pytheas, including Arrete, who takes Simmea’s place as a protagonist and viewpoint character. For a long time, the latter seemed like a huge digression from both the general tone (the gods and their powers weren’t major day-to-day players in TJC, more there for a few plot points and of course the initial set-up of the City) and the primary storyline of investigating Simmea’s death. This feeling, I’m happy to say, was reversed at the end as it was incorporated into the rest in a brilliant way that, in retrospect, I should have seen coming (but would have enjoyed even as a non-surprise) but managed to blindside me entirely and left me very happy with the book as a whole.

This wasn’t how Necessity went, though. The great experiment with making Plato’s Republic seemed to have mostly fallen to the level of backdrop, and the human two thirds of the emotional core of Pytheas-Simmea-Arrete was replaced with two others outside the main family line, who did not fit the ideals of the City in the same way that Simmea and Arrete did, making them less engaging as viewpoint characters. Additionally, I would classify at least Jason as not a protagonist of the story, and maybe not Marsilia either: they’re mostly along for the ride in a story dominated by Apollo and Jatherey (an alien trickster god who had been working with Athene). This is exacerbated by how the storyline is fractured across at least three groups in a way that left less narrative cohesion than there had been in the first two books. Beyond this constructive issue, the story simply wasn’t the story I wanted it to be: it takes place right as the five cities from the original island and Kebes’s offshoots, now on the planet Plato far from Earth and well into the future relative to the 21st century, are about to make first re-contact with humans, who have just arrived in orbit. This ultimate question of the posterity of the Platonic experiment gets almost no focus at all, just being brought up at the start and once or twice along the way before being essentially crammed into epilogue. Rather, the story is about rescuing Athena from the Chaos before and after time and jumping between time periods to gather pieces of a puzzle to figure out how to do that. The nature-of-time-travel theme I could have just passed on, the parts about the relationships between one of the alien races on Plato and their gods was interesting enough but frankly wasn’t developed enough to be more than a supporting thread to the story, and in general I would have preferred more ties to the Republic. That said, it was easily enough to hold my attention, and existing attachment to characters like Apollo and Socrates, and to the Cities themselves, gave me enough of a stake in the outcomes of things to care. And it’s not like there weren’t ties back to the original premise (I really do want to avoid spoiling this for anyone who wants to read even the first book): Crocus, one of the Workers (robots) left in the City after the Last Debate between Athene and Socrates at the end of TJC, is the fourth viewpoint character in Necessity, and he brings a tone to his chapters that’s a closer match to Simmea and Arrete than Jason or Marsilia (and presented in a way that felt distinct from either Apollo or the humans, whether normal or heroes), which I was otherwise missing, and helped to cover more of the history of the people of the planet Plato and how the Platonic cities had developed than was present in the more plot-oriented god/human-narrated chapters; his were very much high points of the book for me.

For all that I perceived a decline over the trilogy, I believe Thessaly was a successful experiment, and well worth reading. And it was a modest decline from a lofty base, and a unique experience the whole way through. (Which hopefully isn’t surprising, bearing in mind the author.) If nothing else, I encourage everyone to give The Just City a shot, and then consider the other two based on that; if you thoroughly enjoyed TJC, you’ll probably at least find TPK and Necessity worth your time.

*Or, (and this one is a major spoiler for the second book, so I’m hesitant to include it and encourage anyone considering reading them to find out then) at the beginning of The Philosopher Kings, Simmea is shot in the chest in an art raid. The wound will be fatal, but not for a few minutes. Pytheas is there, and plans to kill himself so that he will be able to return as fully-powered Apollo, to heal her, saving the life of the woman he’s loved since they were teens or less. She stops him, saying “Pytheas, don’t be an idiot,” then pulling the arrow out herself and killing herself instantly. A major plot thread is determining why she did this rather than allow him to save her life by ending his incarnation. It’s determined in the end that she believed it was important for him to experience the loss of a loved one as a mortal, as part of his project of understanding humanity and increasing his excellence; it was important enough that she die then rather than allow him to end his incarnation early, though it wouldn’t be death in the same sense as hers or anyone else’s, and she’d probably made decision long before that should such an event arise, she would take this route.