Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky is an absurdist ai apocalypse, the story of a robot valet desperate to fulfill his purpose of serving a suitable humanity.
It’s no secret on this blog that I both read and review a lot of books by Adrian Tchaikovsky. He’s potentially my favourite living author, and part of that is because of the wide range of styles and settings he writes in. Service Model is yet another example of Tchaicovsky doing something he’s never done before, and doing it well.
In Service Model we follow the misadventures of Charles (or Uncharles as he comes to be known) a robot programmed to be, if not the perfect valet, then perfectly suited to being a valet. In this world (and the real one) artificial intelligence is only as intelligent as the instructions it has been given, and the conflicting and confusing instructions given to Uncharles by his master causes some small amount of tension as his programming to be efficient clashes against the wealth of inefficiencies in his instructions.
Disaster strikes and Uncharles soon learns that those inefficiencies are endemic to the entire world, with the majority of humans dead and the robots they left behind struggling to deal with the consequences with any sort of rationality. What follows is a quest of sorts, as Uncharles searches for a new master with whom he can fulfill his purpose as a useful valet, each time running into issues, while being aided by a mysterious figure called The Wonk.
What becomes interesting is the question of Uncharles’s sentience. The Wonk is convinced that Uncharles has become sentient beyond his programming, while Uncharles insists that is not the case. Indeed Uncharles doggedly pursues his purpose as a valet, sure that this is because it is what he is programmed to do. And yet, many of the issues he faces are of his own making. Time and time again he is given the option of mindlessly accepting his fate, whether that is to wait in a line for a diagnostic scan that will never occur, or to serve an unworthy or absent master or one of many other fates he might endure like most of the other robots he crosses do. And he does not, citing vague instructions in his programming. But the question of his sentience does remain a question.
The narrative flow of moving from A to B to C can be a little exhausting, especially when it’s clear when the next thing Uncharles has hung his hopes on is going to end, if not badly, with disappointment. But I think that’s more a personal preference than a flaw. It can also be tiring to follow a protagonist so stubbornly ignorant, being a robot desperate to do the job he was programmed to do. The humour helps here – the absurdism is intentionally funny, such as the police detective robot who has to speak aloud and in a stereotypical way, for the benefit of the humans of which there are none present.
Ultimately I had fun reading Service Model, and the way it poked fun at the idea of offloading too many import tasks to unworthy ai, while also asking some interesting questions about sentience and purpose. I’d be curious if Tchaicovsky ever writes another novel set in this world.
Rating: 8/10
Writings of a Doomscribe 