"The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport" by Samit Basu (2023)

 **The author himself admits that this started out as a simple retelling of Aladdin, but then quickly got out of hand . . . don't you care close your eyes*

I learned that even the “original” Arabian Nights Aladdin was a last-minute anthology insertion by a French collector based on a folktale he’d heard from a Syrian Christian storyteller, set in a generic China that was somehow also Muslim and Arab and featured a villain from generic Africa. And then I rewatched the animated film set in Hollywood exotic Arabia featuring classic American cinema/pop-culture references. And I knew that some day I needed to give this roaming orientalist classic yet another temporary residence to call its own. So this book started out as a retelling, a new house for a fable that I could see was tired and lost, but then the place I set the new story in, and the people who lived there, started demanding to be let in. This book is what happened after they took over and invited their friends. I think it stopped being a retelling at some point, but I was too busy trying to clean up after these unruly creatures to tell. Whatever it is, I really enjoyed writing this one!

- from the Author's Afterward 

Ok, put a pin in that.  We'll come back to that (to be honest, this book took a dizzying number of turns.  It jumps from genre to genre, and to hear the author tell it it's not so much part of a big plan as just trying to follow all of these characters as they refuse to stick to the script.  I swear, at one point I sent a friend of mine this message:  "I'm 60% of the way through 'The Jinn-bot of Shantiport' and it's done at least three genre pivots / You'll think I'm exaggerating, but three-fifths of the way through the book I'm not even sure who the main character is")

But let's start where the author started.  This is a retelling of the classic Aladdin story, set in a far-future scifi world.  It draws from multiple sources, both the Disney version and the original (and those familiar with the Arabian Nights will spot plenty of other references.  Sinbad the Sailor, the Roc, etc. all make cameos of various importance).  There are high-tech black markets and oligarchic overlords and citywide robot fights.  That's the backdrop, but the story starts on recognizable ground

The familiar pieces are all here:  Alina, our cunning street rat; her brother and companion Bador, a monkey-bot; a young prince in the palace; a ruthless power behind the throne . . . you get the idea.  All the pieces are in place

Oh, and a piece of outworld alien technology able to wield tremendous power on behalf of whoever controls it.  With, of course, the most hilarious plot device as a limit:

“The jinn grants wishes. Three per user.” 

“Why three?” Bador asks. 

“It was judged to be an appropriate free trial period,” the jinn says. “More wishes can be unlocked in Unlimited Mode.”

I'm sorry, but if you don't find the idea of a Freemium Genie to be hilarious, I don't know what to tell you.  You and I have different taste

That said, this book is not a satire.  The author Basu has taken these familiar pieces but he seeks to tell a story that has a lot to say about the real world.  The easiest example is when our street rat Alina, in her disguise, takes our sheltered prince on a flying tour of the city.  But the whole new world she wants to show him is not a fantastic one, it's the real one that he's never seen before:

She tells Juiful about the dark stories behind Shantiport’s gentrification projects, force-evacuated and rebuilt neighborhoods sold to investors who left long ago or are now heading off to new space homes, while the rest of the city drowns and people die of diseases that were supposedly eradicated centuries ago. She tells him about the river itself, and how builder-cartel bots are flooding Shantiport on purpose, sabotaging every other bot trying to desilt and unclog the drains and manage the river and the flooding, and how the same builders are picking up flood-proofing, reservoir-building, dyke-bot, and gigasponge construction contracts from the Tigers. How all of this is driving people into poverty and homelessness and debt, until they get delinked, and then are picked up by Prowlers, forced into space labor crews, and sold off-planet. How the city is trapped between its rulers, its oligarch, and its crimelord, who may have their own differences, but always somehow manage to work together in the end.

Honestly, Basu could have been content with that.  A scifi version of Aladdin, adding in additional themes of oligarchy and privilege.  It would have been a modern retelling in multiple senses of the word, and would have been plenty fun to read

But that is not where Basu stopped.  As mentioned in the passage at the top of this post, things kind of got out of hand.  Characters that were originally meant to be minor ended up having a lot more to say.  Hell, our narrator, a "storytelling bot" simply observing and telling the tale, ends up being one of the more interesting and deepest characters in the whole book.  Our storyteller itself actually gets caught off-guard a few times, as events that would theoretically be pivotal for a "traditional" retelling of Aladdin end up almost as footnotes because that's not what captures our narrator's interest:

I had thought them fools, but the only real fool here is me, myself, for not understanding a very obvious thing. Lina and Juiful are violently attracted to each other, and capable of denying or ignoring absolutely anything that gets in the way of this. It is possible, even, that they fell in love at first sight, right under my eye, and I missed it entirely. Why else would Lina, in her moment of freedom, throw herself into danger and risk her mother’s plans, and her own? Why else would Juiful decide that the only person he could trust is the stranger bent on destroying his entire clan? 

The answer is clear. The answer is hormones.

I loved this book because of the countless times the author could have stopped, could have been satisfied with a pleasant story, but didn't.  All the times the author looked at this classic story that has resonated across generations, and looked at the world and cast of characters he'd written to tell it, and decided that there was so much more to say

And the biggest change?  Well, it's alluded to above as our "magic carpet ride" actually turned out to be exposing the inequalities of the city, our characters would not be content playing out the Aladdin story.  Become a prince, marry the princess, all that.  Because these characters see the whole system, and they want none of that.  The want to bring it down.  This is a book about revolution

In particular, it's a book about revolution but written from the perspective of a South Asian author, with the weight of that history.  One of our main characters works as a tour guide, and you can feel the venom dripping from this passage:

“And then there were the people who came to Shantiport just for the pleasure of treating its people badly. People really show you who they are when they think you serve them, and they have power over you. Day after day of wanting to say, ‘Okay stranger, thank you for pointing out my home is trash, I know it is, and it’s so much worse than you think, what you’re seeing is just the tip of the trashberg, but you know what, you’re trash too, and so is your entire bloodline and jokes-forwarding list, and all the places their ancestors came from, so thank you very much for your blinding insight and original observation and casual grope, now please, and I say this with nothing but best wishes, go fuck yourself, and don’t forget to leave us a nice rating.’”

That said, they don't give up.  Despite all the chaos, Basu really does have a sense of optimism.  And if the cynical parts of the novel stem from his background in South Asia, I think we have to give credit to South Asia for the optimism as well:

Everyone is programmed to ignore what happens here. So many people have gotten away with genocide in this part of the world, so I think someone might get away with an attempt to achieve social justice as well.

And yet, even that is not enough for Basu.  These characters kept on writing their own stories, in pretty fantastic ways

One theme of this book, a theme that I absolutely adore in modern scifi, is bot rights as an analogy for human rights.  I honestly am glad that I probably won't live long enough to see truly sentient, autonomous robots, because wow is that going to get ugly.  But I've read enough scifi to know what side of that argument I'd fall on--anything with sentience deserves rights

Once more, as our author thought he was writing about a society under revolution, some of the characters spoke up and informed the novel that this was not acceptable.  That bots would not be left behind in this revolution:

Bador’s dream is about bot rights. A world where bots and intelligences aren’t just treated as people by humans who are nice, but guaranteed equals in a society by law. By systems. He knows the details are complicated, that it will take very long before even a small section of botkind has the same rights as humans. He knows that there are valid arguments against bot rights, that resolving them will take years if not generations, that most humans on our world don’t have rights in the first place, that everything in our city is a mess where any person, human or bot, has privileges determined only by closeness to power. He’s not an intellectual or an authority, he’s not got a magic solution, he’s aware that bot rights are an impossible dream right now and he is willing to wait for change, and to kick an incredible amount of ass while waiting.

Fuck yeah.  One step at a time

I still don't totally know what I read here, and I'm comforted by the knowledge that the author doesn't totally know what he wrote.  But damn was it kind of a fun right.  Unbelievable sights, indescribable feelings

I loved this book

“I hope this conversation is not testing your patience.” 

“Not at all. Your curiosity is as natural as you are and should not be discouraged.” 

“That is good to hear. I have been … thinking a lot about the natural, and unnatural, and it has been difficult.” 

Tanai lays a hand on Bador’s head, and he shudders. “If it helps, know that nothing about you is unnatural,” he says. “I have seen this in many worlds—people who believe some aspect of their nature, or their person, justifies their exclusion. You exist, and you deserve to belong. You are a part of nature, just as much as I, or a tree, or a rock, or even a plastic square. And anyone who told you otherwise is no friend.”