[Book Review] Service Model — Adrian Tchaikovsky
Dystopian Wodehouseian Satire? Sounds like another Tchaikovsky novel
Imagine a world far in the future where robots and AI exist to take care of every mundane task, leaving humans to lead a life of comfort and luxury, your every whim, foreseen and suitably taken care of.
Now imagine that most of these humans disappear. What is a robot servant to do, without a master?
Enter Charles, the Service Model.
Adrian Tchaikovsky is one of the most prolific Fantasy and SciFi authors of our age, churning out quality novels, novellas, and stories of every length, and theme, from galaxy-spanning space operas to insectile fantasy warchests, his catalog is among the most diverse in the speculative fiction space. But his unique standalones often explore the most unique themes, and Service Model is no different.
Service Model kicks off with an almost cozy atmosphere, especially for diehard regency-era Wodehouse fans like me, with the classic valet and master setup, except this time, the gentleman’s personal gentleman is the advanced robot Charles. The blend of the algorithmic processes work surprisingly well as a backdrop to Charles’ service to his unnamed Master. We then find out that the Master has died under mysterious circumstances, and Charles suspects that he is the prime suspect.
In Charles’ quest to diagnose (he is much too inorganic to “understand”) his defective programming that supposedly led to his murdering his Master, he leads himself to Central Diagnostics, where he meets the entity that calls itself the Wonk. The Wonk serves as the major foil to Charles (now going by Uncharles) as they spend the majority of the story attempting to convince Uncharles of his freedom and his individual “personhood”, to hilarious (albeit sad) results.
On a quest to uncover any kind of explanation for the sudden disappearance of humankind in this now desolate post-apocalyptic wasteland, Uncharles and the Wonk journey between various locations, each of which showcasing yet another facet of the fallout of the dystopia and how that left the robotkind in a redundant cyclic malaise. From Central Diagnostics, to the Library of All Information, our duo narrowly escapes dire predicaments using clever logic loopholes to bypass several robotic impasses.
Service Model is a potent mix of satirical commentary on regency-era etiquette, the suffocating quicksand of bureaucracy, along with steady commentary on worker’s rights, especially indentured servitude, clothed in the chrome of robots. Tchaikovsky is a master of evoking moods within the reader that often seem tangential to the content of the story. The entirety of Service Model provokes a sense of sadness that stems from Uncharles’ search for purpose, giving him a most humanlike quality with which we cannot help but empathize. Contrasted with the hilarious yet childish optimism that oozes from every line out of the Wonk’s mouth, the duality is a fresh and heady mix. While many will compare Service Model with the likes of The Murderbot Diaries (Martha Wells), with similar themes of a disaffected Robot looking for purpose, this novel draws from the Jeeves and Wooster series (P. G. Wodehouse) with direct references to that series, as well as the iRobot series (Asimov), with a smattering of other literary references and themes.
My only complaint with Service Model is that the final act feels a tad bit stretched out, with a few of the latter locales explored feeling repetitive and not altogether separate from the ones that came before. The climax of the story also felt a bit contrived and overly preachy. The culmination of Uncharles and the Wonk’s journey felt entirely predictable and too on-the-nose with its social commentary. In that regard, Service Model insisted upon itself a little too hard towards the end. With a more open-ended conclusion, Tchaikovsky would have smashed a home run with this novel.
Nevertheless, Service Model is a fun quick read with surprisingly heartfelt moments, which is an amazing feat to pull off merely with words, especially in the context of a robot trying to find his place in this world.
In the end, we are all like Un/Charles, just a cog trying to find our place in this Machine we call Life.
