Jinn-Bot of Shantiport

416 pages

English language

Published Oct. 3, 2023 by Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom, Tordotcom.

ISBN:: 9781250827517
ASIN:: 1250827515
Goodreads:: 65211707

(1 review)

From international bestseller Samit Basu, The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport is an exuberant new sci-fi adventure with heart that reads like a mash-up of Aladdin and Murderbot—with gloriously chaotic results

Shantiport was supposed to be a gateway to the stars. But the city is sinking, and its colonist rulers aren’t helping anyone but themselves.

Lina, a daughter of failed revolutionaries, has no desire to escape Shantiport. She loves her city and would do anything to save its people. This is, in fact, the plan for her life, made before she was even born.

Her brother, Bador, is a small monkey bot with a big attitude and bigger ambitions. He wants a chance to leave this dead-end planet and explore the universe on his own terms. But that would mean abandoning the family he loves—even if they do take him for granted.

When Shantiport's resident tech billionaire coerces Lina into retrieving a …

From international bestseller Samit Basu, The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport is an exuberant new sci-fi adventure with heart that reads like a mash-up of Aladdin and Murderbot—with gloriously chaotic results

Shantiport was supposed to be a gateway to the stars. But the city is sinking, and its colonist rulers aren’t helping anyone but themselves.

Lina, a daughter of failed revolutionaries, has no desire to escape Shantiport. She loves her city and would do anything to save its people. This is, in fact, the plan for her life, made before she was even born.

Her brother, Bador, is a small monkey bot with a big attitude and bigger ambitions. He wants a chance to leave this dead-end planet and explore the universe on his own terms. But that would mean abandoning the family he loves—even if they do take him for granted.

When Shantiport's resident tech billionaire coerces Lina into retrieving a powerful artifact rumored to be able to reshape reality, forces from before their time begin coalescing around the siblings. And when you throw in a piece of sentient, off-world tech with the ability to grant three wishes into the mix… None of the city's powers will know what hit them.

1 edition

enne📚 reviewed Jinn-Bot of Shantiport by Samit Basu

4 stars

Jinn-Bot of Shantiport is an exuberant action-filled science fiction novel with Aladdin and ~Murderbot vibes[*]. The narrator here is Moku the flying bot, who in service to squabbling siblings Lina and Bador, the other two main characters. Bador is the monkey bot brother with dreams of escape to space and of bot liberation, while carrying a lot of anger at how his family treats him for not being human. Lina's the daughter of failed revolutionaries who works hard to avoid surveillance and has her own ideas of how to make the city better. And that's all before the lamp granting wishes shows up.

This book reminded me a lot of Suzanne Palmer's Finder book; both are set in a city with warring factions, there's some weird alien technology, and both are stories filled with banter and action. They are not the same story by any stretch, but there's a lot …

Jinn-Bot of Shantiport is an exuberant action-filled science fiction novel with Aladdin and ~Murderbot vibes[*]. The narrator here is Moku the flying bot, who in service to squabbling siblings Lina and Bador, the other two main characters. Bador is the monkey bot brother with dreams of escape to space and of bot liberation, while carrying a lot of anger at how his family treats him for not being human. Lina's the daughter of failed revolutionaries who works hard to avoid surveillance and has her own ideas of how to make the city better. And that's all before the lamp granting wishes shows up.

This book reminded me a lot of Suzanne Palmer's Finder book; both are set in a city with warring factions, there's some weird alien technology, and both are stories filled with banter and action. They are not the same story by any stretch, but there's a lot of parallel vibes and I think if you enjoyed one you'd probably enjoy the other.

Extremely minor asides: I appreciated that although the book focuses on Shantiport for the whole story, there's still a taste of politics in the larger universe. I also enjoyed the fact that this felt like a third person perspective book, and then halfway into the first chapter the book busts out a first person pronoun for Moku with no warning. Love that introduction.

My disappointment here, if anything, is that the denouement of the story let me down. Some bits were overexplained (Lina) and the story opened up too many loose ends that didn't get tied off. On top of that, several of the final chapter's developments felt surprising and out of place for both Bador and Moku. It just (subjectively, for me personally) didn't quite give me the closure and satisfaction that it felt like the book was leading up to. Maybe this would land differently for other folks.

(A few extra bonus spoilery thoughts in this post too.)

Overall, this was still great fun and I'm glad I read it.

[*] (Loooook, I hate always saying that any book where there's a non-human narrator who looks askance at human behavior and has a bit of a wry tone is "like Murderbot", but it's mildly true here? You can't really say "it's like Star Trek's Data" because that involves a lot of "but that's not logical, Captain" and that's not really the vibe; Murderbot, Emergent Properties, and this book all are about bots dealing with emotions while also being non-human. Murderbot definitely deals with its own trauma and emotional avoidance in a way that these other stories aren't really about at all, but there's just still some similar "wry non-human outsider" vibes here that I'm not sure how to gesture at non-referentially even as they're all very different stories.)