Review:
Necessity, by Jo Walton
| Series: |
Thessaly #3 |
| Publisher: |
Tor |
| Copyright: |
July 2016 |
| ISBN: |
0-7653-7902-3 |
| Format: |
Hardcover |
| Pages: |
331 |
Athena's experiment with a city (now civilization) modeled after Plato's
Republic continues, but in a form that she would not have
anticipated, and in a place rather far removed from its origins. But
despite new awareness of the place and role of gods, a rather dramatic
relocation, and unanticipated science-fiction complications, it continues
in much the same style as in
The Just
City: thoughtful, questioning debate, a legal and social system that
works surprisingly well, and a surprising lack of drama. At least, that
is, until the displaced cities are contacted by the mainstream of
humanity, and Athena goes unexpectedly missing.
The latter event turns out to have much more to do with the story than the
former, and I regret that. Analyzing mainline human civilization and
negotiating the parameters of a very odd first contact would have, at
least in my opinion, lined up a bit better with the strengths of this
series. Instead, the focus is primarily on metaphysics, and the key
climactic moment in those metaphysics is rather mushy and incoherent
compared to the sharp-edged analysis Walton's civilization is normally
capable of. Not particularly unexpected, as metaphysics of this sort are
notoriously tricky to approach via dialectical logic, but it was a bit of
a letdown. Much of this book deals with Athena's disappearance and its
consequences (including the title), and it wasn't bad, but it wanders a
bit into philosophical musings on the nature of gods.
Necessity is a rather odd book, and I think anyone who started here
would be baffled, but it does make a surprising amount of sense in the
context of the series. Skipping ahead to here seems like a truly bad
idea, but reading the entire series (relatively closely together) does
show a coherent philosophical, moral, and social arc.
The Just
City opens with Apollo confronted by the idea of individual significance:
what does it mean to treat other people as one's equals in an ethical
sense, even if they aren't on measures of raw power? The Thessaly series
holds to that theme throughout and follows its implications. Many of the
bizarre things that happen in this series seem like matter-of-fact
outcomes once you're engrossed in the premises and circumstances at the
time.
Necessity adds a surprising amount of more typical science
fiction trappings, but they turn out to be ancillary to the story. What
matters is considered action, trying to be your best self, and the earnest
efforts of a society to put those principles first.
And that's the strength of the whole series, including
Necessity: I
like these people, I like how they think, and I enjoy spending time with
them, almost no matter what they're doing. As with the previous books, we
get interwoven chapters from different viewpoints, this time from three
primary characters plus some important "guest" chapters. As with the
previous books, the viewpoint characters are different again, mostly a
generation younger, and I had to overcome my initial disappointment at not
hearing the same voices. But Walton is excellent at characterization. I
really
like this earnest, thoughtful, oddly-structured society that
always teeters on the edge of being hopelessly naive and trusting but is
self-aware enough to never fall in. By the end of the book, I liked this
round of characters nearly as much as I liked the previous rounds
(although I've still never liked a character in these books as well as I
liked Simmea).
I think one incomplete but important way to sum up the entire Thessaly
series is that it's a trilogy of philosophical society-building on top of
the premise of a universal love for and earnest, probing, thoughtful
analysis of philosophy. Walton's initial cheat is to use an deus
ex machina to jumpstart such a society from a complex human world that
would be unlikely to provide enough time or space for it to build its own
separate culture and tradition. I think the science-fiction trick is
required to make this work real-world societies that try this end up
having to spend so much of their energy fighting intrusion from the
outside and diffusion into the surrounding culture that they don't have
the same room to avoid conformity and test and argue against their own
visions.
Necessity is not at all the conclusion of that experiment I would
expect, but it won me over, and I think it worked, even if a few bits of
it felt indulgent. Most importantly for that overall project, this series
is generational, and
Necessity shows how it would feel to grow up
deep inside it, seeing evolution on top of a base structure that is
ubiquitous and ignored. Even the generation in
The Philosopher Kings wasn't far enough removed to support that;
Necessity is, and in a way this book shows how distinctly different
and even alien human culture can become when it has space to evolve on top
of different premises. I enjoyed the moments of small surprise, where
characters didn't react the way that I'd expect for reasons now buried
generations-deep in their philosophical foundations.
This book will not win you over if you didn't already like the series, and
I suspect it will lose a few people who read the previous two books. The
plot structure is a little strange, the metaphysics are a touch strained,
and the ending is, well, not quite the payoff that I was hoping for,
although it's thematically appropriate and grew on me after a few days of
thinking it over. But I got more Socrates, finally, who is as delightful
as always and sorely needed to add some irreverence and contrariness to
the the mix. And I got to read more about practical, thoughtful people
who are trying hard to do their best, to be their best selves, and to
analyze and understand the world. There's something calming, delightful,
and beautifully optimistic about their approach, and I'm rather sad to not
have more of it to read.
Rating: 7 out of 10
Here's a blog post I wrote for the puppet.com blog. Many thanks
to Ben Ford and all their team!.
With everything that is currently happening around the world, many of us IT
folks have had to solve complex problems in a very short amount of time. Pretty
quickly at work, I was tasked with finding a way to make virtual meetings easy,
private and secure.
Whereas many would have turned to a SaaS offering, we decided to use Jitsi
Meet, a modern and fully on-premise FOSS videoconferencing solution.
Jitsi works on all platforms by running in a browser and comes with nifty
Android and iOS applications.
We've been using our instance quite a bit, and so far everyone from technical
to non-technical users have been pretty happy with it.
Jitsi Meet is powered by WebRTC and can be broken into multiple parts across
multiple machines if needed. In addition to the webserver running the Jitsi
Meet JavaScript code, the base configuration uses the Videobridge to manage
users' video feeds, Jicofo as a conference focus to manage media sessions and
the Prosody XMPP server to tie it all together.
Here's a network diagram I took from their documentation to show
how those applications interact:
Getting started with the Jitsi Puppet module
First of all, you'll need a valid domain name and a server with decent
bandwidth. Jitsi has published a performance evaluation of the
Videobridge to help you spec your instance appropriately. You will also need to
open TCP ports 443, 4443 and UDP port 10000 in your firewall. The
Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world during March 2020 (
No more nagging me about the placeholder image from Wikipedia I used in
Here's what the team did today:
tumbleweed
Stefano started the day by hacking away on our video archive. We eventually want
to upload all our videos to YouTube to give them exposure, but sadly our archive
metadata is in a pretty poor shape.
With the script tumbleweed wrote, we can scrape the archive for matches against
the old DebConf's pentabarf XML we have.
tumbleweed also helped Ivo with the ansible PXE setup he's working on. Some
recent contributions from a collaborator implemented new features (like a nice
menu to choose from) but also came with a few annoying bugs.
ivodd
Ivo continued working on the PXE setup today. He also tried to break our ansible
setup by using fresh installs with different user cases (locales, interfaces,
etc.), with some success.
The reason he and Stefano are working so hard on the PXE boot is that we had a
discussion about the future of our USB install method. The general consensus on
this was although we would not remove it, we would not actively maintain it
anymore.
PXE is less trouble for multiple machines. For single machines or if you don't
control the DHCP server, using ansible manually on a fresh Debian install will
be the recommended way.
olasd
After a very long drive, olasd arrived late in the evening with all our gear.
Hurray! We were thus able to set up some test boxes and start wiring the airbnb
properly. Tomorrow will certainly be more productive with all this stuff at our
disposition.
pollo
Today I mainly worked on setting up our documentation website. After some
debate, we decided that 
Of course, reality has trouble matching all the post-processing filters.
Plan for the week
Now on a more serious note; apart from enjoying the beautiful city of Cambridge,
here's what the team plans to do this week:
tumbleweed
Stefano wants to continue refactoring our ansible setup. A lot of things have
been added in the last year, but some of it are hacks we should remove and
implement correctly.
highvoltage
Jonathan won't be able to come to Cambridge, but plans to work remotely, mainly
on our desktop/xfce session implementation. Another pile of hacks waiting to be
cleaned!
ivodd
Ivo has been working a lot of the pre-ansible part of our installation and plans
to continue working on that. At the moment, creating an installation USB key is
pretty complicated and he wants to make that simpler.
olasd
Nicolas completely reimplemented our streaming setup for DC17 and wants to
continue working on that.
More specifically, he wants to write scripts to automatically setup and teardown
- via API calls - the distributed streaming network we now use.
Finding a way to push TLS certificates to those mirrors, adding a live stream
viewer on 
The twelveth update in the 0.12.* series of 
It's been a while. And currently I shouldn't even post but rather pack my stuff because I'll get the keys to my flat in 6 days. Yay!
But, for packing I need a good sound track. And today it is 
Thats So Raven
If I could sum up the past year in one word, that word would be distraction. There have been so many strange, confusing or simply unforseen things going on I have had trouble focusing like never before.
For instance, on the opposite side of the street from me is one of Jersey City's old resorvoirs. It's not used for drinking water anymore and the city eventually plans on merging it into the park on the other side. In the meantime it has become something of a wildlife refuge. Which is nice except one of the newly settled critters was a bird of prey -- the consensus is possibly some kind of hawk or raven. Starting your morning commute under the eyes of a harbinger of death is very goth and I even learned to deal with the occasional piece of deconstructed rodent on my doorstep but nighttime was a big problem. For contrary to popular belief, ravens do not quoth "nevermore" but "KRRAAAA". Very loudly. Just as soon as you have drifted of to sleep. Eventually my sleep-deprived neighbors and I appealed to the NJ division of enviromental protection to get it removed but by the time they were ready to swing into action the bird had left for somewhere more congenial like Transylvania or Newark.
Or here are some more complete wastes of time: I go the doctor for my annual physical. The insurance company codes it as Adult Onset Diabetes by accident. One day I opened the lid of my laptop and there's a "ping" sound and a piece of the hinge flies off. Apparently that also severed the connection to the screen and naturally the warranty had just expired so I had to spend the next month tethered to an external monitor until I could afford to buy a new one. Mix in all the usual social, political, family and work drama and you can see that it has been a very trying time for me.
Dovecot
I have managed to get some Debian work done. On Dovecot, my principal package, I have gotten tremendous support from Apollon Oikonomopolous who I belatedly welcome as a member of the Dovecot maintainer team. He has been particularly helpful in fixing our systemd support and cleaning out a lot of the old and invalid bugs. We're in pretty good shape for the freeze. Upstream has released an RC of 2.2.26 and hopefully the final version will be out in the next couple of days so we can include it in Stretch. We can always use more help with the package so let me know if you're interested.
Debian-IN
Most of the action has been going on without me but I've been lending support and sponsoring whenever I can. We have several new DDs and DMs but still no one north of the Vindhyas I'm afraid.
Debian Perl Group
gregoa did a ping of inactive maintainers and I regretfully had to admit to myself that I wasn't going to be of use anytime soon so I resigned. Perl remains my favorite language and I've actually been more involved in the meetings of 
What happened in the 
I got an email last year pointing out a cosmetic issue with
changelogs.debian.net. I think at the time of the email, the only problem was
some bitrot in PHP's built-in server variables making some text appear
incorrectly.
I duly added something to my TODO list to fix it, and it subsequently sat there
for like 13 months. In the ensuing time, Debian changed some stuff, and my code
started incorrectly handling a 302 as well, which actually broke it good and
proper.
I finally got around to fixing it.
I also fixed a problem where sometimes there can be multiple entries in the
Sources file for a package (switching to using
api.ftp-master.debian.org would also address this), which caused
sometimes caused an incorrect version of the changelog to be returned.
In the resulting tinkering, I learned about