Karma is a stone cold bitch. Of course, we all already know that. It’s one of the fundamental laws of the universe, right up there with Murphy.

But when the djinn King Melek Ahmar waks up after a 4,000+ year nap, the version of Karma who is running the nearby city/state/corporation of Kathmandu is more literally a bitch than he, or even we, imagined.

It’s also true that mankind creates their gods in their own image. Based on Kathmandu, we also create our utopias in our image as well. The difference is that we create deities in the image of what we actually are, while we create utopias in the image of what we’d like to be.

When the Lord of Tuesday and his Gurkha sidekick (or perhaps that’s the other way around) arrive in Kathmandu, those two contradictory images come into sharp and broken-bottled conflict. Karma, the AI running the city, gives everyone what they need. Melek Ahmar games the system by using his power to give everyone what they want. No matter how perverse or destructive it might be.

What the Gurkha Bhan Gurung wants is what he’s wanted for over 40 years. He wants revenge on the man who sold his family into distant death, who stole his home and his property and who has lived off the riches he amassed from the misery he caused every day since.

More than that, Bhan Gurung wants to deliver karma, up close and personal, on the AI Karma who made it all possible.

No matter how much blood and how many bodies he has to wade through to make it happen.

Escape Rating A: This is a book that has repeatedly popped up for me as a possible read, but hadn’t quite leapt to the top of the TBR pile. But in this week of constant doomscrolling, it suddenly seemed like the time.

And now I understand why this got so much buzz and was nominated for so many awards when it came out two years ago. Because it’s just awesome. It’s also a story that does not go where you think it will, which just adds to the fun. And it has a high snark quotient, which just makes it even more my jam than I expected it would be.

At first, it seems like Melek Ahmar is going to be a figure of either fun or terror. Or possibly the first right up until he turns into the second. But he is, to at least some extent, laughing at himself. After all, what he seems to want most is a bunch of people to get drunk and have a party – or possibly a drunken orgy – with.

What he finds is a world vastly different from when he went to sleep. To the point where he is a bit lost and easy prey for a single-minded manipulator like Bhan Gurung. Gurung wants to move the city, and Melek Ahmar looks like a really big lever.

Or possibly just a really big tool. Either way, Gurung thinks Melek will be useful. And he’s right.

What makes this story, however, is the way that it manages to comment on so much of the present, no matter its futuristic setting.

The AI Karma is a fair and impartial tyrant, and she’s created a utopia for the people who live within her boundaries. When Melek and Gurung “invade” Kathmandu, they set off a cascade of events that pokes holes in the beliefs about Karma’s impartiality, her fair-mindedness, and her benevolence.

And in the process we end up questioning her purpose, her intent and especially her value system. A value system that is the heart of her seemingly benevolent dictatorship. If you squint, it makes the reader question both capitalism and consumerism, along with a whole bunch of other -isms that are currently powering our world towards unstoppable climate change, extremes of income inequality and other outcomes that look so dire in the future because no one in the present is willing to upset the status quo.

Which in a way is what Karma enforces even as she seems to be doing the opposite. The way she operates points out to the reader that maintaining the status quo is never truly neutral.

And that no one who operates in the political sphere, not even a supposedly impartial AI, can keep their hands clean.

There have been a few books in the last couple of weeks where the sum of their individual parts did not manage to equal up to a whole. Take yesterday’s book as an example, although that’s not the only one in recent memory. This one, however, managed that feat of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts, to the point where it feels like this one is still adding itself up and talking back at me about more and more ideas that it touched on.

All of which is making me even more excited for the two books by this author that are now rapidly moving up my TBR pile, Kundo Wakes Up, set in a different part of this same world, and Cyber Mage, which promises to be completely different. I’m very much looking forward to reading both. Soon!

This novella was a pleasant surprise. I hadn’t read anything by Hossain before, but The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday turned out to be amusing, engaging, and also thought-provoking. I very much enjoyed it.

To begin with, I wasn’t sure what sort of novella this was going to be: the whimsy and humour is pretty stacked in the opening pages. However, this quickly balanced out as we become more familiar with the setting and characters. The novella is populated by with a fascinating, fun, colourful and varied cast of characters.

Whether following Kathmandu’s “sheriff” (it’s a title with little power or respect), or Gurung and Ahmer, we learn more about how this society works (and doesn’t). How did the world get to where it is, how did Karma come to control and run the city? What is Gurung hiding, and who is he really? Will Ahmer ever be satisfied? What is Gurung’s agenda in pushing Ahmer to grant the citizens’ worst wishes? These questions and more are answered in this novella.

“No one ever wishes for anything good…”

“I guess Karma gives them all the good stuff,” ReGi said. “You’re kind of the antithesis. Melek Ahmar, the darkness in their souls, made incarnate.”

The author injects his characters’ romp through future Kathmandu with both subtle and overt commentary on the growth of technology and social media’s place in our world and daily lives — it’s by no means preachy, but it is sharply observed. People who live in Kathmandu each has an “Echo” — a device that monitors and maintains their health, as well as a kind of implanted communication device complete with a media feed, social media, and so forth. There were a couple of times when Gurung or another character is forced to disconnect from what they are seeing through their Echo, and one can’t help but think of acquaintances who struggle to disconnect from their cellphones.

“Gurung was well known here. He ambled from table to table with his bowlegged swagger, slapping people on the back, swooping down to kiss a couple of ladies on the cheek, and conversations started up; people jolted awake, remembering that he had no Echo, they broke out their dusty, unused voices, and he left a small trail of noise and laughter, of life, behind him.”

One more thing that I thought was amusing. In the bars, the drinks are delivered as cubes. It is drunk by “eating the cube like a watermelon, even as it dissolved into dark rum.” Couldn’t help but think of the Glenfiddich’s capsules (announced after this novel was written).

Ultimately, this is an entertaining and engaging read. The novella builds to a great final confrontation, with an interesting and satisfying ending. Solid characters, very good writing, and well-paced.

Definitely recommended.

Really fascinating blend of magic and sci-fi elements combined with a main protagonist who is a very different kind of character than I'm used to reading! I don't know if this book is for everyone, but after I was finished I really just wanted more of the world so it's a win in my book.

The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday was delightful! A powerful djinn (The Lord of Tuesday, among many other titles), has awoken after a very long sleep. The world is not as he remembers - post climate change, nanotech is required for people to live. The djinn, Melek Ahmar, meets Bhan Gurung and the two team up to raid Kathmandu. But Bhan Gurung has an agenda, and a government official named Hamilcar Pande is on their tail. This book was so much fun to read. It was a short, quick read, but contained a fully constructed, fascinating world run by an AI named Karma. I always enjoy reading about djinn, and the snarky Melek Ahmar was no exception. Sometimes books this short feel short on plot or character, but this was a full fledged story. Recommended!

Tor.com novellas continue to be the platform giving voice to diverse thought experiments in science fiction and fantasy that we just *wouldn't get* anywhere else, and Saad Hossain's "The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday" is a fine example. It's also, I must add, a thought experiment pitting magic versus the machine, the artificial versus the natural, and the ordered versus the chaotic ... *as systems of governance.* The agent of chaos is a djinn, the agent of order is an artificial intelligence, and the battleground is the city of Kathmandu, rising from the ashes of a future so terrifying I honestly don't really want to think about it for long. The djinn stumbles across a former Gurkha soldier who becomes his companion and confidante, while the artificial intelligence—Karma—keeps a human failsafe nearby to be our access point to its inner workings.

Early on, I was on the verge of finding myself annoyed at Hossain's use of stereotypes—the uncontrolled, ravaging (and sexually ravenous) djinn, the stoic ex-soldier without a war to fight, the private investigator desperate for a case to distract himself from his own bleak introspection, the amoral and unfeeling artificial intelligence guiding human affairs without dispensing justice to the citizens under its care. And one of these stereotypes does persist throughout, but the others are thoroughly dispatched by the novella's conclusion, the characters grown into rich and round personality. I enjoyed the denouement, the author's final stance on matters of human nature and destruction, as well as the characters themselves. For someone who felt uncomfortable with them even halfway through, that's a stunning reversal and worthy of my respect.

A wonderful addition to the entire science fiction and fantasy continuum!

Djinn and AI in far-future Kathmandu. I love books with both gods and robots, so this was a delight for me. Fun, funny and fast.