I’ve always wanted to do a deus ex machina ending where Zeus shows up and sort of sorts everything out, because people always say don’t do it. At the end of that book I have my great deus ex machina ending. The book is about choices and grief, and also a little bit about colonialism, from a really unusual angle. And for the characters growing up there, it is normal. But now she’s fifty, and she’s spent most of her life trying to do Plato’s Republic, as if it’s a normal thing – the only possible thing. There’s one point of view character, she’s from the Victorian era, and when she thinks about it she can remember there were years in which nobody thought about Plato at all. The second book is twenty years later, and a lot of things have happened and the Republic has splintered into five different cities where everybody’s trying to do Plato in conflicting ways.

And, I think, because I read The Republic (380 BC) when I was fifteen, I was very aware of that. Plato said, start with ten-year-olds, as if ten-year-olds are nothing, are blank. Different things are important to these people. What I wanted to do with it is explore issues of liberty and consensuality and axiomatically different ways of thinking about living. It’s kind of a Utopian experiment with, and one of the things I say about it is, what could possibly go wrong? Well, things go wrong and things go right. The first book takes place a bit over ten years. The first book is about Greek gods and philosophers from throughout time, a handful of slave children, and a bunch of robots setting up Plato’s Republic. It is a family saga, a generational saga.

It is actually quite an old fashioned thing. What is it like writing something so complex yet keeping it engaging and approachable? It deals with time travel, alien planets and Plato’s Republic.

Your most recent series of novels, the Thessaly trilogy, came to an end last year. Jo Walton was in Edinburgh for the Edinburgh International Book Festival and kindly agreed to talk to us while she was there. Her most recent work, the Thessaly trilogy (2015-16), is about time travellers, Greek gods and robots building Plato’s Republic. Jo Walton is the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Award winning author of Among Others (2011), Tooth And Claw (2003), a comedy of manners fantasy novel about a family of dragons, the Small Change trilogy (2006-8) which imagines an alternate history in which Britain capitulated to the Nazis in 1941, the Tiptree Award winning My Real Children (2014) and many others.

The thessaly trilogy by jo walton