Service Model

This book reads to me as satirical Gulliver's Travels style book with a task-following robotic protagonist, but leaning more towards social commentary than political. However, I have such mixed feelings about it. Even if I agree with the book's messages about wealth disparity, meaningless jobs, and how systems need kindness, the length of the book overstays its welcome and the didactic ending feels heavy handed.

Some of its travel destinations felt repetitive by the end, and in my opinion a number could have been edited out without the book losing much at all. (If I were to make these edits, I personally would have trimmed out Decommissioning, the Library, Ubot; oh, and also, some of God's employment opportunities, as I feel like the Jul@#!% scene covers that just as effectively.)

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.

I've come to expect more from Tchaikovsky. This one let me down.

I bought this book almost 100% based on the description of it being Murderbot meets Redshirts, and it does not disappoint.

Somehow, this book manages to feel both timeless and absolutely a product of this very moment in history - addressing the problems faced by our society and its present love of artificial intelligence in a way that just as easily could be commentary on the industrial revolution or mechanization or automation.

The references (starting from the very first section heading) made me laugh aloud on numerous occasions, and Tchaikovsky's dry and self-aware humour at his own use of convention is delightful.

This book won't be for everyone, but it was certainly for me.

Service Model reminds me of Tchaikovsky's Dogs of War.

Written for a very novice sci-fi audience, every concept is explained in exhaustive detail and in first person. which turned out to be a very convoluted way of conveying the sciencefictional idea behind the novel that the experienced reader got early on.

I got through about 30% of the book and gave up.