Beyond Reality discussion

Have you finished reading The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport by Samit Basu? What did you think of it?

Spoilers OK here!

Overall, I found this to be an entertaining read. A dystopian drowning city ruled by gangs and oligarchs. A beautiful idealistic woman and her brother-bot with a warrior soul too big for his body. A powerful but mysterious space adventurer. A (theoretically) unbiased observer bot to record it all. And, finally, a trickster jinn that's a cross between an all-powerful being, a artificial intelligence, and an infomercial, with a vision all his own.

Wishes in stories never turn out the way the wisher intends. There always seems to be a catch. And the next person inheriting the jinn's service can just use their wishes to un-do what happened before (although in this story there are some limitations). Even the most well-thought and altruistic wishes have a downside. I enjoyed seeing that conflict play out here.

This took me longer to read than I thought it would. I had a hard time getting into it. But I'm glad that I stuck with it! What a fun interpretation of the old Aladdin/jinn legends. It was lovely to be inside Moku's intelligence as he slowly lost his objectivity and fell in love with his family.

Just finished this one. I liked the unique aspects:
Robot but subjective narrator,
Cat shaped robot
Giant fighting bots who fight for sport
A ditzy prince
But it's more of a light read than a thoughtful exploration. It's a good versus evil tale with a few twists but many of the characters are flat and the plot somewhat predictable. It's an enjoyable read overall.

We are in a world that appears to be in the future. A future so far ahead that most of history seems lost. Not just due to time, but also due to different factions making history revisions that obliterates much of what was. I’m still unsure if Shantiport is a city on Earth or not, but I have landed on the position that it does not really matter.

The story is told to us through a drone bot, Moku, who is discovered in the river by Bador and gifted to his sister Lina. They live in the city of Shantiport. Bador is not human, he is a bot, created by Lina’s parents, made to look like a monkey. Lina is human but heavily modified both genetically and with cyborg thingy-ma-bobs.

Bador and Lina end up having a shared ownership of Moku, who has lost most of its memory. While Bador wants to become a space hero, Lina wants to save Shantiport from sinking. She has inherited her revolutionary ideas from her parents. Her father seems to have hidden some powerful artefact somewhere. They also find a ring. Bandor ends up putting it into his head, it gives him a crazy amount of new abilities.

Lina is forced to help her father’s old business associate, he wants the powerful object her father has hidden. At the same time a space hero, Tanai, arrives in the city, his agenda might also be to seek out this object. Meanwhile Bador uses his powers to fight in a robot tournament, because winning this allegedly will let him go out to space, and probably also because fighting is fun for him,

“His name is Mecha Emperor Ultrapower. —Emperor my ass. It’s a big drone is all. I name it Roboflop.”

Moku starts entertaining the idea that itself may be the powerful object everybody is seeking, it starts to disobey its owners to follow its own path to the truth.

Neuromancer, Murderbot, The Lies of Locke Lamora, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Aladdin, I Robot - the list of other stories this book can make you think of is long.

There is humour, there are plots. But there also are strange contradictions and many names to keep track of. Some parts are a bit slow to read. The battle scenes between robots are tedious. Who cares what machine wins a war game? The robots are advanced AI, so advanced they have a crazy amount of human emotions and motives. Even when they are not programmed to have it.

Shantiport makes me think of old sailor songs, shanties. Bador the mechanical monkey makes me think of the Indian god Hanuman, who not accidentally also is known to do the Hero Pose.

Lina finds the magic lamp that contains the jinn-bot. She and Bador bring it to their mother. They discuss what three wishes to ask of the jinn-bot. This turns to a political discussion where Lina wants a full revolution, her mother Zohra wants reforms because she thinks revolutions historically have proven too destructive. So they both share the same goal, but have a hard time agreeing how to get there. Instant or gradual redistribution of wealth; communism or socialism. Bador doesn’t participate in this part of the discussion, he embraces freedom through escapism and wants to go somewhere else and start over. Like many Europeans that left for “the new world” between the 1700’s and now did/does. The antagonists of course want to oppress and exploit the populace, so they are conservative or even reactive in their stance, freedom for them is for the privileged and the privileged are those with enough ruthlessness and not enough decency to grab and cling to power by any means necessary. This struggle is fought on a dying world, and it occurs to both Lina and Zohra that they have to save more than Shantiport if there is to be any point in saving Shantiport. Zohra exclaims,

“I still believe revolution is possible, and I have waited so long for it, here in this dying muddy city that people are fleeing anyway, between typhoons and floods and killer bots, under the eyes of the Tigers and the oligarchs, and a sun that will melt you if you find no shade.”

It turns out the rumours of a dying planet are planted by those who want the rabble to leave so they can expand their power and wealth easier. The end has two or three too many twists and makes the reader think that yes, reality is complicated, please don’t bring too much of just that into books too! But then we would have missed a couple of the boss fights that makes us think of Donkey Kong, or the twist where the ring saves Moku from fragmentation and the turn where Tanai and Bador fight together as a whole as Aladdin. Tanai's role in the story begins to feel like divine intervention, or at least like he was sent there by others to help Lina and Bador. I would even be open to the idea that he was sent there by Lina’s father. In the end Bador and Moku proclaim their love for one another and join Tanai on a journey into space, while Lina stays behind with so much power she is scared it will corrupt her.