Wednesday Reading: The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport by Samit Basu

[chomiji]

Lina and her monkey-bot brother Bador live in Shantiport, a failing spaceport city that's been run by a succession of power-hungry animal-themed clans over the centuries. Now the city is drowning, sinking into the surrounding wetlands even while its Tiger Clan overlords, crime bosses, and tech oligarchs fight over who gets to rule what's still working. Lina, who works as a tour guide for off-world visitors, loves the city and wishes she could save it. Bador, far more childish, wants to leave the soggy wreck and explore the universe. Unexpectedly, a side-gig that Lina accepts puts the siblings into the heart of the political maelstrom that Shantiport has become.

The novel explores some serious themes—the civil rights of artificial intelligences, the ethics of embedding loyalties into living beings, what does political leadership owe those it rules, and more— but the framing and narrative techniques ultimately didn't work for me. Action will stop while characters engage in lengthy debates with each other, the protagonists will suddenly break character and play out a stereotyped scene seemingly imported from some other genre, and viewpoint of the majority of the story is at two removes from the reader, so that everyone seems flat and distant.

The setting is vivid and it's always refreshing to have a set of source cultures that are beyond the typical SF U.S./Europe analogs, but ultimately it wasn't enough. In fact, I nearly gave up until somewhere about the halfway point, when suddenly some of the chickens starting coming home to roost for both the leads and their adversaries.

One of the things that got on my nerves as the core of the plot began to emerge was that although Zohra, the siblings' mother, keeps referring to "friends" and "allies that we trust," we never really meet anyone else. The battle-bots that Bador insists on challenging in crime boss Paneera's arena have individual names, but as far as the reader can tell, the little family is completely alone in a city of faceless fellow citizens. They have no other relatives, no neighbors, and Lina seems to have no colleagues in the tour business, although I think her supervisor is mentioned in passing early on. But really, the family are the heroes, there is one mysterious ally from outer space, and everyone else who is mentioned and described is an antagonist, except for a handsome Tiger Clan member who does a heel-face turn.

Everyone else is a mook.

And then there's Moku, whom we discover as the actual narrator about 8 pages in.

Moku isn't omniscient. And after the first few chapters, he* is not even impartial. He's supposed to be a story-bot, and somehow this is supposed to be a wonderful thing, All it meant to me, though, was that everything was reported blandly, and we only saw people's emotions reported in the third-person by an intelligence that doesn't really understand emotions very well. And Basu doesn't manage Martha Wells' Murderbot trick of making this kind of narrator somehow present those emotions so that they engage the reader.

I understand that Moku is meant to be undergoing some profound mental evolution through all this, and also that he is serving as Bador's morality pet, but neither of those factors helped me engage with this novel.

I can't say that this book was a total waste of time. Once the opponents and their objectives became clear, it was sometimes a bit of a page-turner. But I doubt I'll ever go back and re-read it. If it was a hard copy instead of an e-book, I'd be dropping it off in one of the neighborhood Little Free Libraries before the week is out.

*Yes, he's gendered, but gender isn't really one of the things explored. (Lina's instant crush on Juiful is one of those things that had me going "what the hell?" And although Juiful's passionate and brief sexfest with Antim was worth a laugh of surprise when it happened, it didn't do much for the story except to imply that Juiful is happy to screw anything with a pulse. Or something. I'm still not at all sure why that happened, except that it kept Antim distracted for a while.)

I've seen this flaw of not being able to engage the reader immediately in several of the books I've read recently. It's as though the author has a big set-piece that they are dying to present to the reader but haven't given enough thought about how to get the reader there.

Comments

[oracne]

Sounds like interesting ideas, just some execution issues.

[chomiji]

Indeed!