Lilibet Bombshell's Reviews > The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport

I absolutely adored Samit Basu’s previous novel, The City Inside, and while The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport doesn’t quite meet the bar set by that novel it’s still a phenomenally clever, enormously creative, and endearing novel.

The story is told from the point of view of Moku, a long-lost piece of alien tech known as a story-bot. His function is to observe, record, and then assemble people’s lives into stories. He was found at the bottom of one of Shantiport’s many polluted rivers, down in the muck inside of a vault by one of the book’s other main characters, Bador. Bador is a bot himself: even though he has the visage of a monkey and has eyemojis instead of eyes, he’s the little brother of a human girl named Lina. Lina, Bador, and their mother have all been under tight surveillance ever since their family patriarch disappeared under the auspices of being a dissenter. In the years since then, Lina’s been working hard to ferret out where their father hid all his hidden tech around the city and Bador has been reluctantly helping her while growing more rebellious and outspoken about bot rights and his dreams of becoming a space hero and getting out of Shantiport.

This is an Aladdin retelling, but it’s not a tightly-woven one. Basu admits in the afterword that the characters kind of went and did their own thing somewhere along the way and I assume he had to keep pulling them back in line with his original ideas. That’s totally okay. Most fairy tale retellings have to have an elasticity to the weave in order to let the author’s interpretation flow through it. I think the problem is that along with the Aladdin retelling, there’s a huge subplot to this book with bot-fighting (in the blurb you can see the nod to Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries, which I’ve never read), and those bot-fights, along with the parts of the plot that come with them, take up huge chunks of page time that felt a lot like filler to me. While the bot-fighting is an important part of Bador’s journey as a character (and Moku’s, too, to an extent), I came away feeling that a lot of it was just empty page time.

The great thing about having a story-bot as a narrator is reliability. Moku is honest, to a fault. Honest and honorable. He’s sweet, caring, anxious, brave, excited, curious, studious, reflective, and capable of great amounts of emotion. At first he’s so limited in what he wants to do, thinks he can do, and thinks he needs to do, but as the books goes on Moku evolves as he begins to care about Bador and Lina as if they’re his family. He’s idealistic, romantic, and a little naive because all he knows are stories…and humans are messy. Moku is honestly my favorite character in the whole book and the only one who made me cry.

There’s a great layering in this book about the differences between generations on how to solve problems: whether to solve it in small, incremental steps and hand off the power to the next generations and trust them to make the best decisions or to make big, sweeping changes and hope the dust settles where it should. It’s about raising your children to think big and to dream big dreams and then telling them, “Hold up! I know we said to dream big, but you can’t just change everything just like that! It’s too much change! You have to think smaller and slower!” is okay or if it’s time for you to stand aside and trust that you raised your kids to do the right thing. The power has to be handed over sometime. Small changes don’t work forever. Some changes just can’t wait for a committee hearing.

Samit Basu is a masterful storyteller and an immaculate worldbuilder. He doesn’t miss anything in his books. Shantiport is a sinking city that was once beautiful. It’s been colonized too many times and has changed ruling clans again and again. It’s besieged by typhoons and pollution and mostly ruled by criminals. Basu gives you all the vibes, helps you paint the pictures in your mind, and lets you feel the humidity, the squelching mud, the glittering holographs, the plasma swords, and more. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable read even though it's a little too long and a little too messy. I still highly recommend it.

I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.

File Under: Dystopian/Fairy Tale Retelling/Science Fiction