Title:
Aristoi
Author:
Walter Jon Williams
Publisher:
Tom Doherty Associates, Inc., NY, 1992
ISBN
0-312-85172-3

At Graduation, every five or seven or ten years, the Aristoi celebrated in Persepolis.

For the most part they celebrated themselves.

Persepolis, in the Realized World, was an interesting artifact. It shaded by degrees into "Persepolis," the real place becoming, through its illusory/electronic deeps and towers, an ever-flexible, ever-unfolding megadimensional dream.

As I started reading this story, I thought I had found yet another cyberpunk story, and braced myself for yet another onslaught of trite visions of an unrealistic and impractical future.

I should have expected better from Mr Williams.

Within the next few pages, I was firmly drawn into the world of the Aristoi, godlike humans living in a utopian future. Except for a few remaining challenges, the Aristoi have conquered all disease, poverty, war, and crime. They are an elite of women and men who have trained themselves to the peak of what the human mind, coupled with high technology can accomplish. They are the only ones who are trusted to make the final decisions that can mean life or death for entire planets.

By itself, this setting would indeed have been trite. But Williams presents to the reader a compelling examination of the value system of western thought, in the form of a powerful drama of politics and intrigue.

Utopian musings are ancient. Plato used them in "The Republic" to come to grips with the "just man." More's eponymous "Utopia" was a diatribe against the faults of the British. In the genre of science fiction, utopias - and dystopias - are commonplace.

Often these vehicles, though, seem overwrought for the purposes they try to accomplish. Aristoi, however, tackles a task beyond dream spinning. Williams has taken Plato's philosopher kings, thrust them into their perfect world, and asked, "Can this be a human world? Can we remain human when all our challenges are conquered?"

William's characters mostly move in a shadowy background against the presence of Gabriel, the allegorical protagonist. The dramatis personae are not much diminished because of this, though. Aristoi hold within them limited personalities, and much of the characterization that takes place involves these.

To dramatize Gabriel's multiple presence on the stage of the story, Williams occasionally uses two parallel columns of text. This might have turned out intrusive, but here it aids in creating the portrait of a character that is inhumanly complex. This complexity is brought to bear on a mystery, and when the mystery is solved, on the question that is asked allegorically through the entire story.

In the end, much of my impression of Aristoi may be of my own manufacture. But the story, I think, stands well on its own, and compares favorably with any number of recognized masterpieces in the genre.