A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

This book will make no sense if you have not read The Just City. Read that first. (I reviewed it; click on the author name tag.) Though the plot is completely different, I would say that if you liked the first book, you will like the second, and if you didn’t like the first, you won’t like the second. Though I did miss the robots. And also several of my favorite characters from the first book.

Since I read this six months ago, I am not going to recap the plot, which is incredibly spoilery anyway. However, feel free to put spoilers in comments.

Like The Just City, The Philosopher Kings is a novel of ideas populated by painfully human (and some endearingly or terrifyingly inhuman) characters. There was some discussion as to whether the first book made sense as something that human beings would do, even with Godly assistance. I thought that it absolutely rang true as a portrayal of a bunch of single-minded fanatics who get together to run things their way. In other words, a cult. Of course, that is an outsider’s insulting term. An insider would call it a planned community. A true believer would call it a utopia.

I grew up in one of those. The details were totally different, but in many ways the atmosphere was very much the same. I was Matthias, taken from my home at a young age and given a name and identity I never accepted. The moment I got the chance, I snatched another name, one that I felt was true, fled, and began doing what I felt was right, which was basically the opposite of everything I’d been indoctrinated into. Sounds good, right? After all, cults are bad, right?

Well… It worked out for me. I had my own values that I picked up elsewhere, and hung on to for dear life, fixing them more and more into the core of my self at every daily attempt to teach me to believe in something else. I like my values and they suit me, but they are odd values for an American civilian (and have caused quite a lot of conflict in my life when I forget that I am the only person in the room who has them.) “I cannot die until my king has safely reached the fort.” "Service before self." “Duty, honour, courage.”

(On that note, thank you very much, Shivaji, Tanaji, Jijabai, Baji Prabhu, Rani Lakshmibai, for inspiration that lived on hundreds of years beyond your deaths. And thank you even more to the Base Commander of the Ahmednagar Army Base and every single person I ever interacted with who was in or working for the Indian army at Ahmednagar. You were the only people who were consistently kind to me, often going well out of your way or bending rules to do so, and that was so consistent that "protect helpless children whether they're citizens or not" must have been knocked into your heads at boot camp. It is an excellent ideal and I am not surprised that I extrapolated it to "ALL these people's ideals are excellent." In fact, I still think they're excellent and had I been Indian myself, I might well have joined the Army. (To be clear: I think the ideals are excellent. No comment on specific military actions, many of which directly contradict the stated ideals.)

But that was me. If I had decided to take my values from the Catholic school I attended, or from Indira Gandhi, or from Georgette Heyer, or from Kurt Vonnegut, or from any of the other thousands of possible influences on me other than the ones I was actually there to learn, I would have done very different things with my life. Being wronged does not always teach you justice. Having a just cause does not necessarily make your actions just.

As I said in my review of the first novel, you cannot make any sense of this book without the idea that depiction does not equal advocacy. I do know Jo a bit, though not well, but certainly well enough to know that she is not an advocate of rape, slavery, infanticide, torture, colonialism, kidnapping, or any of the other absolutely horrifying things presented in the novel and advocated quite persuasively, or else excused and minimized, by otherwise sympathetic characters.

I expect that there are ideas in the book that Jo does agree with, because there are a lot of ideas in the book, but I don’t know what they are and hesitate to guess, with one exception. I think Jo probably really would like to go back into the past and rescue lost or destroyed works of art, if it could be done without creating some kind of catastrophic butterfly effect. I would too. I think anyone sensitive to art would, unless they are very, very devoted to mono no aware and evanescent art; ice sculptors, perhaps, or tenders of cherry trees.

But despite the patent impossibility of the book advocating everything it’s depicting, it does feel like a book that’s advocating something, partly because the characters are all very passionately advocating things (often completely opposed things), and partly because most thought experiment novels are indeed advocating something and in fact were written for that purpose. But if it’s advocating something, what in the world is it advocating?

I think it’s advocating that you think about the ideas presented and draw your own conclusions. Very consistently, characters who are otherwise good or worthy or admirable people have horrific ideas and do horrifying things. Characters with extremely justifiable grievances are not necessarily nice people; characters who deserve to have bad things happen to them meet fates so far beyond what they deserve that that the reader feels guilty for wishing anything ill on them at all; characters who are charming and talented yet not good at all are exalted for their skills rather than for their moral character; Gods have extraordinary powers, but they are no more moral or ethical or right than any given human.

This is all very deliberate. It makes it impossible for the reader to draw the easy conclusion that good people do good things, bad people do bad things, and the morality of an action is determined by who does it, not by the action itself. The latter is a very common cognitive error that is enormously destructive on both small and worldwide scales. “My country, right or wrong.” “Priests are good and holy, so anything a priest does is good and holy.” “That woman is a liar and a con artist; why should I believe anything she says?” “That man is a war hero; who better to hold public office?”

I don’t know if that’s what I was meant to take from the book, which seems to be written as a mirror distorted just enough to make you really examine what you already believe. But it’s what I do take from it.

When I sat down to think about the book, I came to the conclusion, which had not occurred to me before, that I probably would have enlisted in the Indian army had I had similar encounters with them if I'd been an Indian citizen. In other words: I don't, in fact, have an essential problem with belonging to a cult/planned community/very formalized in-group. I just didn't like the one I was actually in. I think this shows how The Philosopher Kings is a genuinely thought-provoking book.

Also: absolutely killer ending. It was perfect and logical, yet completely unexpected. I can’t wait to read the next book.

Apollo wants to understand why Daphne would rather be a tree than have sex with him. Athena wants to find out what would happen if she took everyone throughout time who has ever prayed to her to let them live in Plato’s Republic, gave them a doomed island, a bunch of robots, and children to raise as per Plato’s ideas, and told them to go for it. A young Victorian lady named Ethel renames herself Maia and devotes herself to the Just City. Two children, taken from the slave markets and given to the Just City, come to opposite conclusions about its worth.

Out of all of Jo Walton’s strange premises, this one takes the cake. Even more than “Framley Parsonage, but everyone’s a dragon.” But I love that she thinks of ideas like this, has the chops to carry them out, and is supported by a publisher who will publish whatever bizarre book she chooses to write. The Just City is a terrific book that I can’t imagine anyone else writing.

It’s a novel of ideas in the very best sense, full of complex and interesting questions with no easy answers, and populated by three-dimensional characters who care deeply about and are profoundly affected by the issues at play. (The issues include but aren’t limited to consent, free will, nature vs. nurture, whether the ends justify the means, and how idealistic movements and planned communities succeed and fail.) Since I grew up in a planned community, I found the book particularly interesting. It does not escape Walton that one of the most toxic issues in a planned community or progressive movement is the willingness to sacrifice vulnerable members for the supposed good of the whole, nor that the same community can be a utopia for one person and a dystopia for their neighbor.

This is the first of a trilogy, but comes to a conclusion that’s open-ended yet satisfying, shocking but inevitable in retrospect. I guessed where it was going in general, but was completely surprised by the details.

You don’t need to be familiar with or care about Plato’s Republic to read this. The book explains everything you need to know. It’s much more about larger issues of utopia/dystopia than about the Republic specifically, though the actual specifics are from the Republic. Note that it contains rape, slavery, child harm, and other disturbing things, and also characters endorsing all sorts of terrible opinions. This is not a book to read if you want the voice of the author interjecting to assure you that terrible things are terrible. It’s very much a book where many opinions are presented and it’s left to the readers to draw their own conclusions.

If you intend to read this, avoid reviews. There’s several plot twists that will be more satisfying if you don’t know about them in advance. Spoilers are fine in comments.

The sequel, The Philosopher Kings, is out now.

The Just City

A semi-autobiographical fantasy, beautifully written and very odd. Like Walton’s equally though differently odd Lifelode, it struck me when I read it in advance copy as a novel destined for a small but extremely enthusiastic audience. But it’s getting a huge, huge promotional push, so it will certainly get a far larger readership than Lifelode. It will be interesting to see how it’s received outside of fandom.

Morwenna (Mori) and Morganna (Mor), are Welsh twins growing up amongst ruined and operating factories which they pretend are sites from Lord of the Rings. There they meet with real fairies who sometimes give them magical tasks. These fairies are more like the weird creatures from a Hayao Miyazaki movie than like anything normally seen in western fantasy, living expressions of the natural world. The nature of both magic and fairies is strange, ruthlessly unsentimental, hard to pin down, and even harder to prove.

One of those magical tasks evidently had horrific consequences, because the next time we see Mori, her sister is dead, she’s been severely injured, she’s been separated from her evil mother but also from the family she loves, and she’s sent to boarding school. There she reads a lot of sf and fantasy, looks for fairies, slowly comes to terms with magic and her sister’s death and her family, and becomes involved in fandom.

Though there are some very dramatic scenes, the action and tragedy and magic mostly twine through the background and the backstory; the foreground is Mori’s life at boarding school, and most of all, her thoughts about the books she reads and her introduction into fandom via an science fiction and fantasy club. It’s almost a “secret garden book,” in which the action of the story consists of emotionally significant moments taking place in a small, often private, and atmospherically described landscape. In this case, books take the place of a physical location.

It’s too bad that the novel ends before C. J. Cherryh began writing her major books, because the way that magic operates – to twist the world in deniable ways so that the desired outcome is the result of things that happened long before you cast the spell – is very Cherryh-esque, as is Mori’s solipsistic terror that she created all her friends, and they didn’t even exist before she cast a spell to get some.

As that paranoid-sounding anxiety suggests, a reader of mainstream fiction could plausibly interpret this novel as a realistic one about a girl caught up in a delusional fantasy world. I don’t think any fantasy reader would, but the possibility does give the novel a disquieting edge.

I thought Among Others was very moving and engrossing, but I’m just barely close enough to Mori's generation of sf fandom to be able to follow most of what was going on in her reading world, and so in her inner life. Unlike the literary references in Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin or Walton’s own book reviews, I generally didn’t get much of a sense of what the books read by Mori were like unless I’d read them too.

I'm curious to see how accessible or appealing Among Others is to readers of a later generation than mine, who don’t have that context, or to readers who enjoy sf but have never been involved in fandom. But if you began reading sf in the 60s-70s, or if sf fandom is a crucial part of your life, this could be one of your favorite books of all time. Reviewers who fit that description have said exactly that.

Note: There is a brief, non-graphic scene in which Mori's father drunkenly comes on to her. This happens once and, to my surprise, does not have any significant repercussions, but I'm mentioning it so anyone who might be upset by coming across it unwarned is warned. Since it doesn't affect the plot, I'm leaving it outside of the spoiler-cut.

( Spoilers have identity confusion )

Among Others

I didn't read this for a long because I had been under the impression that it was a continuation of Walton's King's Name/King's Peace books, which are very cleverly thought-out and well-written alternate-Arthurian which unfortunately feature a first-person protagonist who is stubbornly uninterested in everything that interested me about the story, and fascinated by everything that I found boring. (Similar to my problem with Robin McKinley's Sunshine-- I wanted to know more about the wider world, but Sunshine was monomaniacally focused on baking.)

But oyceter told me that A Prize in the Game is only tangentially related to the other books and does not have the same narrator, and recommended it. So I read it, and I'm glad I did... except that now I think I have to give the Sulien books another try to find out what happened after the very abrupt ending.

A Prize in the Game is set in an alternate Ireland marked by the use of magic which people find ordinary and unremarkable but which has clearly had profound implications for their society, and in which the terrifying and strange visitations by Gods jar the characters just as much as they do the readers.

The novel focuses on five young people who start the story trying to grow up, find their niche in life, and claim their loves, and end it as pawns of politics, fate, and the Gods: Darag, whose own agency has been overwhelmed by the magic surrounding him; Ferdia, who doesn't quite realize that he's in love with Darag; Conal, Darag's rival; Emer, a warrior woman in love with Conal; and Elenn, Emer's sister, whose beauty might as well be a curse even if it wasn't literally inflicted on her by some malicious God.

Walton's style is spare and very readable, and the story, especially in the first half before the Gods start interfering, is a compelling account of battles, friendship, more battles, and first love. There are a number of points when crucial action happens off-page, and I am still not sure why Walton chose to dramatize some events and recount others second-hand and in retrospect. But I did enjoy the novel a great deal, especially the first half, in which the stakes are not as high as they get later, but the emotions are more immediate.

As the novel gets closer to the end, the tone becomes both more intense and more distant, the characters fall into archetypal patterns, and the story feels less like a fantasy novel than a prose ballad retelling.

I am a bit baffled by the ending. I understand what happened, but not why, and the story seemed not so much resolved as stopped short. Does it continue in King's Name/King's Peace? I vaguely recall that Elenn was in those...

Warning: comments may spoil the ending.

The second in Walton's alternate history series about a Britain which made peace with Hitler and slid into fascism. I liked the first, Farthing, quite a bit; it was in the tradition and to a large extent the style of Agatha Christie, though with considerably better prose.

I liked this one even more. Though the setting is now more familiar, the fact that everything that was wrong in the first book is still wrong and getting worse gives the book a less shocking but possibly even more disturbing atmosphere. Plus, it involves a gender-reversed production of Hamlet which is cleverly paralleled with the story, and I always adore backstage drama.

Viola Lark (formerly Larkin) left her freakish wealthy family of negligent parents and five briliant, eccentric, and/or crazy sisters to become an actress. When she's cast as Hamlet in a production that will be attended by Hitler, one of her sisters, now a devoted Communist, drags her into an assassination plot. Like Hamlet, Viola vacillates over what she should do, and it doesn't help that she's kind of crazy; unlike Hamlet, she has the additional pressure of being involved in a phenomenally creepy Stockholm Syndrome romance with the bomb maker who will kill her if she tries to wriggle out of her place in the plot.

Meanwhile, Carmichael, the morally compromised gay police officer, investigates a bombing which we realize, though he does not, is related to the plot against Hitler. His lover really needed much more character development considering his importance in Carmichael's life and life choices; the other cops are given more character and page-time.

The conclusion, though shocking in its particulars, is horribly inevitable. Like Hamlet.

Don't begin this book late at night, or you, like me, will be up till the early hours of the morning. If the last one had the form of a cozy mystery, this one has the form and narrative drive of a thriller.

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