Karma will get you in the End

[mtvessel]

Jan 2020
The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday - Saad Z. Houssain – Tor.com, 2019
* * * *
I enjoyed my previous encounter with this author but found the book tonally uneven. This one is rather better, successfully fusing Arabian Nights-style djinni magic with a well-developed science fiction thought experiment set in a future Kathmandu. It's quite funny, too.

Melek Akhmar, the titular Lord of Tuesday, is an ancient, powerful and immodest djinn who wakes up after millennia asleep. Unfortunately for him, things have changed really quite a bit in the intervening years. Climate change and nanotech wars have made life outside cities impractical for most people, so the first person he meets is an unassuming Gurkha called Bhan Gurung, who for reasons of his own is living off the grid. He persuades Melek that the nearby city of Kathmandu Incorporated is ripe for conquest. It is ruled by Karma, a relentlessly fair AI that closely monitors people's behaviour via implants and rewards them for their public service. But the magical field that surrounds djinn disrupts reality, and therefore technology, at the quantum level. Which is rather handy for someone on a clandestine mission.

The fun of this book lies in the working through of the governing concept of Karma and in the comic interactions between fish-out-of-water Melek, crafty Gurung and some other characters that I won't spoil. Houssain takes the trouble to explain how Karma came to be and ensures that his worldbuilding is dovetailed into the plot, something that far too few modern science fiction authors bother to do. The djinn quantum disruption field is a great Dr Who-style piece of handwavium to allow traditional magic to co-exist with high technology and makes for some nicely effective action scenes. At 160 pages the book doesn't outstay its welcome either. Those looking for depth of characterisation may be disappointed by the refusal to go much beyond stereotypes, but like a good Hollywood blockbuster, a certain amount of shallowness is forgivable when the end result is so enjoyable.