Book Review: Jo Walton - Necessity

Despite this conclusion to the fantasy trilogy being the most science-fictional, set in the future as it is, in a way it reminds me the most of the ancient Greek dramas it uses for source material. The ideals of the Just City have been translated to humans on other planets, the Worker robots, and even alien species, but the characters spend much of their time debating their relationship to Fate and Necessity in a way familiar to anyone who's read Oedipus. I was a bit frustrated in the middle, because their continuous time traveling to collect plot tokens often felt too much like a recapitulation of the wandering in the previous novel, but like always, Walton manages to address issues with The Republic in an organic way. Way back in the first book, Socrates awoke the sentience of one of the Workers in exactly the same way he taught Meno's slave how to double a square, and throughout this volume Walton sprinkles in the same clever callbacks to other Platonic dialogues - in one funny scene, a character they visit loves the feminist ideals of the Just City but can't imagine how they get along without slaves, which should give anyone skeptical of Sheryl Sandberg-esque corporate feminism a lot to think about, and the way several of the main characters end up in a polyamorous soul-bond with aliens (don't laugh) is a nice update of Plato's musing on how the souls of men and women relate. The closing points about whether the robotic Workers might be the only ones who can actually embody the virtues necessary to implement the Republic mesh nicely with the lessons about virtue, free will, and consent that were set up on the very first page of the first book.