Review: Service Model

Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've read (and own) a great many of Adrian Tchaikovsky's books, and this one is a bit different than his usual large-scale, stuffed-with-ideas space opera. This is his version of a "robopocalypse," complete with plenty of wry British humor (a great deal of it rather on the black side) and a much smaller and more personal sense of stakes that nevertheless winds up feeling just as important as the fate of a world.

This is the story of Charles, later Uncharles, a high-class robot valet who just wants to find a human to serve. Unfortunately, in this near-future slow apocalypse, there are very few humans to be found, due to some sort of environmental or societal collapse. The reasons for this are vague at first, and are revealed, in a rather more sinister fashion, as the story progresses. The inciting event on Charles' journey is what happens in the opening chapter: his master is murdered, and it seems like Charles performed the deed...though he has no idea how, or why, he could have done such a thing. Nevertheless, while shaving his master one morning, he moved the straight razor a little too far to the left and slit his master's throat.

After his master's death, Charles is cast out from his manor, and this begins an epic road trip across a vastly altered Earth. It includes stops ranging from an underground human enclave run by a tyrant to a battlefield with the remnants of robot armies caught up in a never-ending war, to an encounter with an AI "God." (The all-too-brief chapters dealing with the robot army are the funniest and most absurd of the book, as one of the armies is commanded by a "King Ubot" who has built itself up to be a giant mecha, complete with its own internal ecosystem made up of many other smaller robots grafted into its body. Unfortunately, it stuffs one too many smaller robots into its frame and ends up exploding all over the battlefield.)

Through it all, Charles is our viewpoint character, a bit like Martha Wells' Murderbot (but far more British) in that he is riddled with anxiety and uncertainty, denying he is anything more than an unassuming "service model" and yet exhibiting the most humanity of just about any character in the book. (Even more than the seconday protagonist, who Charles names "the Wonk," who he thinks is a severely malfunctioning robot and doesn't realize is an actual surviving human until nearly the end of the book.) The Wonk tries her best to convince Charles he is a thinking person with free will, which he valiantly resists until he realizes his "God" was the one who betrayed humanity. At the book's end, the Wonk, Charles, and other robot and human survivors are beginning to rebuild civilization, and even though Charles insists he is "only a valet" it is clear he is a vital part of the emerging new world order.

I was surprised by how funny this book is. I hadn't thought the author capable of writing such wry, understated humor that catches the reader off guard, but he pulled it off--I laughed out loud many times while reading this book. At the same time, this book is a clever satire of the whole "robopocapyse" sub-genre, with Charles acting as a sort of anti-Terminator. The author also has some rather pointed critiques of capitalism and "all the other utterly pointless genital-waving that humans who were a bit too much into guns and uniforms had historically been partial to." The book is not Tchaikovsky's usual sort of story, but I quite enjoyed it.



View all my reviews