2019
In The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday, we start the story with the deposed djinn monarch Melek Ahmar waking up waking up inside a coffin after something like 4000-5000 years of imprisonment and slumber. At the height of his prehistoric power, he had a lot of honorifics, including the titular Lord of Tuesday, but no one remembers him or particularly believes in djinn any more.
The first person Ahmar meets is Bhan Gurung, a former gukha soldier, now living as a hermit in a cave outside Kathmandu. Gurung bring Ahmar up to date. It's some time in the future, the Earth is polluted and depopulated, the atmosphere is full of toxic nano-robots, and all humans have cybernetic implants that connect them to the internet and generate good nanites every time they exhale. (This whole set-up seems unduly complicated for a 100ish page novella, but whatever, the implants also give people constant instantaneous medical care.)
Kathmandu is run by a supposedly non-sentient, non-conscious AI named Karma. Karma gives out free food and housing, and runs the economy by setting a fair price for all transactions, and paying people for deeds that benefit the public good. (The only currency left is karma points.) Ahmar wants to be a king again, and Gurung wants revenge on one of the richest men in the city, so they set off to make trouble.
The duo briefly try raising an army of malcontents, only to discover there basically are no malcontents - Karma's version of UBI includes free beer, so even the gamblers and layabouts are basically happy to not rock the boat. Next they set up in a garden and start granting wishes. People can already get almost anything they want, so all the wishes are for very anti-social stuff. (Or so Hossain tells us, the only example actually we get to see is a woman wishing for an earthquake to destroy her neighbor's house.)
Ahmar can in fact grant wishes, because he is literally made of magic, doesn't show up on camera, can't be predicted by algorithms, and breaks all the tech around him. Karma is understandably worried, and brings in a human investigator to figure out how to make the djinn go away. The investigator figures out who Gurung wants revenge on and why - the guy got rich kidnapping people and selling them to cities with too low a population to ward of the bad nanites, Gurung's family was among the victims.
So the gurkha and the djinn go to confront the rich guy, and the investigator 'betrays' Karma by helping the outcasts get justice / revenge. The pair set off on a road trip, and in the aftermath of the rich guy's death, Karma and Kathmandu are both transformed, setting up two possible sequels.
This thing definitely feels like a small part of a larger project. There's just way too much worldbuilding, and it's way too complex for a book of this size otherwise. There's a second teenage djinn who doesn't serve much purpose in the story, and the whole wish-granting interlude doesn't actually seem to advance anyone's plans; it just kills time for those characters while the investigator figures out the truth about the evil rich guy.
The depiction of the Karma AI was the most interesting part of the book for me. Hossain's depiction feels like it's in conversation with Westworld and Person of Interest about what an AI-run society would look like. Despite the way the initial set-up of Karma is implicated in the evil rich guy's human trafficking scheme, it Hossain's version seems considerably more utopian than the others. (I can't tell which, but Karma's behavior in the last section is either a failure at consistent characterization on Hossain's part, or a hint that Karma IS sentient and has been keeping that secret from the humans.)
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