Samit Basu

I think I found this book via a Kobo recommendation. Because of course, since I read Murderbot, I must be interested in anything featuring bots. Sigh.

And, well. I loved it! But it has nothing to do with Murderbot except, well, bots.
I have to say that some serious suspension of disbelief is required as regards the world building and plot, but that’s not what I’m interested in. The characters are wonderful. I love how they all grow and evolve, especially the narrator, Moku, a show more “storybot” who starts as a slightly befuddled but more or less objective observer but grows more and more emotionally involved with the family he met and became a part of.

One thing that I kept reflecting on throughout the book. While everyone in our world seems to be freaking out about AI taking over, I notice that a lot of fiction featuring bots, cyborgs and androids features the one issue that Silicon Valley moguls, commentators and basically everyone who is voicing an opinion in public about this subject is studiously avoiding: slavery. show less

About four years ago I bought a Fitbit to track my steps and heart rate. Last year I began to resent the tyranny of the Fitbit. Was it a tool, or was it running my life? I started taking it off when I slept or was sitting quietly. I forget to wear it, or only wore it when I went on a walk. When I read about smarttatts early in The City Inside, it gave me the willies. Sure, it alerted the character to stress and suggested stress-relief techniques. But it was my nightmare come true–being show more enslaved to a device that wanted to run your life!

Samit Basu’s fertile mind has created a future India that seems to be just a few steps away, and it is terrifying. Smart tattoos are the least chilling part of this world. The wealthy, priviledged few live in gated communities with their own water suppliers and power source, and they hire their own guard army. The rest of humanity is lucky to get a a few buckets of water a week and may end up trafficked to an organ farm. You go inside to breath fresh, clean air. And Flowstar influencers wield power over the masses.

But isn’t that where we are going?

Joey’s parents remember the Yeats Not to Be Discussed, a tumultuous time of pandemics and uprisings and death. They haven’t adjusted to the afterworld run by oligarchs. The news is all a lie and personal privacy a thing of the past–even your house spies on you. They don’t understand the “loyalty based economy” or the Flowverse with its Flowstars and nonstop scripted stories.

Joey is a Reality Controller, the best in the business. Her old friend Rudra wants nothing to do with his rich and powerful family’s business, a chain of “family clinics.” When the family patriarch dies, his brother pressures him to join the business in “human resources.” Joey comes through with a job offer to edit flows and he gladly takes it.

Over the course of the novel, what Joey and Rudra learn is chilling; there is the city and there is the city inside the city, preparing to take over. Instead of using technology for human good, the world is controlled by human greed. The citizens of the city outside are just meat to be used and new technology threatens to end all self-determination. And at the center is Rudra’s family ‘clinics’.

Basu certainly has the ability to world create. He had my head spinning. His vision is chilling, terrifying, and too believable. The relationship between the main characters and the Flowstars are complicated and interesting. The ending of the novel open ended; don’t expect a big victory. The protection of human freedom is a continual fight in this world, as it is in ours.

I received a free regalley from the publisher through Edelweiss. My review is fair and unbiased. show less

Shantiport is ancient and decaying, with flooded areas, crime lords, and ruling criminals from off-world, though the world is cut off from participating directly in the space-spanning organizations that contest for power in that wider sphere. Lina has sent her bot brother Bador find items, among which is the narrator Maku, whose mission is to record the story of its user. The characters and setting are worth spending time with; the plotting is a bit all over the place, and the ending, while show more not unfitting, doesn't quite satisfy. And it is sort of an Aladdin retelling. Sort of. The Jinn is not particularly entertaining, being more of a MacGuffin. show less

In authoritarian, climage-change-wracked India, it’s still possible to be in the elite and keep your head down, only worrying about water shortages and targeted sexual harassment. The main protagonist manages a Flowstar, which is like an Instagram influencer but worse, and tries to navigate family and professional challenges while not thinking too much about the structures that constrain her—until, maybe, she can’t avoid them. It’s very well done and leaves glimmers of hope.