Service Model

Charles, a robot valet, unexpectedly murders his employer. He then sets out on a journey to Diagnostics to find out why he did it, and starts a heroes journey of sorts. Through seven episodes, mostly accompanied by the Wonk, who he meets at Diagnostics, he journeys through a societal landscape where humans are mostly dead or scrabbling to survive.

So what happened? The Wonk wants it to be that robots have obtained self-awareness. Charles just wants to be a valet for a human, but is complex enough to act unhappily at some of his opportunities. Even though he claims to be incapable of unhappiness.

I found myself really liking Charles, but that may be my internal tendency toward the satisfaction of ticking off tasks on a task list, which is what a lot of Charles' internal monologue is about. The overall story is good, but it is overly long (7 episodes in Charles' quest) and I just wanted to get on with it in a few places.

I haven’t previously read anything by this author. I gather Service Model isn’t his usual style. From the blurb, it looked to be an intriguing combination of dystopian adventure and comedy of manners.

I think my first impression was fairly accurate. We have UnCharles as the sole viewpoint character trying to understand and interact with the world within the (sort of) constraints of his programming, instead of limited by social conventions. We follow him and The Wonk on a journey that satirises several well known literary works. (Or maybe parodies? I never remember what the terms mean...) I’m only passingly familiar with those, so I may not have appreciated all the references.

In terms of plot, the structure wasn’t your standard sci-fi adventure. I’d say UnCharles was a traveller experiencing different showcased environments in a scripted way, rather than a robot on a mission, even if that’s what he was trying to be. I think the focus was more on social commentary than on plot.

UnCharles undertakes explicit evaluation and decision-making regarding his experiences and actions. While I could understand the reasons this was spelled out on page, especially during his interactions with other robots, it did make the reading slow. This was especially so in the first couple of sections. There were also several comments along the lines of  (paraphrased) “if UnCharles had been human, he would have felt ("specific named emotion") but since he wasn’t, he didn’t” which felt clunky.

Overall, an interesting mash-up of road trip and social commentary.

I thank the publisher for a free copy of this Hugo-shortlisted novel. This is my honest review.

This book starts with a bunch of absurd humor, and as the story goes on, that humor gets mixed in with the darkness of the dystopian setting and overall plot. It kind of resembles Tchaikovsky's Cage of Souls, but whereas that book was more adventure, this one is more dark comedy.

Tchaikovsky does manage to pull off the combination well. The main character, being a robot, brings a bunch of robotic aloofness to the narration, which actually works pretty well with the overall mixture of simultaneously aloof and dark tone of the book. While the main character keeps encountering perhaps too-poignant and neatly tied up episodes of his adventure, like the hero in some sort of a fable (which is where the comparison to Cage of Souls comes to mind), the character is sufficiently compelling to carry the book forward.

The conclusion to the overall plot could perhaps be more satisfying; it, too, tries to be rather poignant. The setting could perhaps be more fleshed out and less fable-like, but it works with the structure of the story.

An entertaining and thoughtful book about the end of the world as we know it and a robot who wanders through it and comes out at the end with, perhaps, a way to remake the world to be better. The story is full of SFF and literary allusions to writers and situations, especially Asimov's positronic robot stories, as well as other writers like Kafka, Orwell, Borges and Dante.

Charles is a robot valet and, as the story begin, murders his master. He suspects a malfunction and leaves the mansion to return to a central service for decommissioning. During the journey, we see the world through his eyes, and it is a world that has decayed and gone to waste, with no humans to be seen, but lots of robots, all waiting for confirming instructions from humans that never come.

His journey is in vain, for other robots are waiting before him to be examined. Now things take a turn for the unexpected when he meets up with an unusual 'robot' known as the Wonk, who adds unexpected tasks and trigger a re-interpretation of tasks in Uncharles' (formerly Charles) decision-making process.

The Wonk is attempting to find out what happened to the world. And together, they will make a journey through a wasteland landscape to find answers: first in an underground farm that is trying to recreate the mindless workplace of the past, then in a Library Archive that doesn't really archive, and so on. As the journey progresses, Uncharles begins to see loopholes and new ways to reinterpret his instructions, all the while trying to figure out his place in the now desolate world, which no longer needs his skills as a valet.

Their journey would end when they end up in the only place left with authority. But the answers they get there would not be the ones they expect, and the only way to survive is to challenge authority and come up with their own way to remake the world.

The story is full of social commentary about how we live and how robots are treated, if we had intelligent but not sentient robots. The question of robot sentience is asked many times in the story, but the answer may depend on how you interpret the ending of the story.