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.

This book reminded me of two other books I've read in the past few years. One was [[The Cyberiad]] by Stanisław Lem which also had robots for characters, but which was more of a collection of satiric fairy tale stories than a sustained narrative, the other was [[The Children of Men]] by P. D. James which shares an end-of-the-world viewpoint but has nothing like the absurd humor of this book. It seemed to me like quite a departure from the rest of this author's work with a distinct sociological edge. The reader starts to want this bizarre world to start to make sense. The narrator, a robot called "Uncharles" for most of the book experiences a malfunction in the early chapters, and after he leaves his familiar surroundings wanders through a broken world hoping to find something similar to his previous existence. I think there might be a lot of P. G. Wodehouse in the characterization of Uncharles. Along the way he encounters a being known as "The Wonk" whose breezy, cavalier attitude toward everything conceals a serious quest for meaning. It is a slow-paced telling partly to remind us of the love of orderly routine most simple machines like these robots favor, to make their chores easier. There are close scrapes with danger and lots of misunderstandings as they look for a place with the answers, only to find that they were mirages. By the end, the two of them reach a kind of understanding in a nice, cozy way with a hint of how the rest of the awful world might be induced to stop falling into ruin. But by this point, the reader might be too skeptical to believe a happy outcome possible.

I did like the way the audiobook was narrated by the author, but it is a slow process of making it to the end. If you pick this up, set aside enough time to make it through or you'll be frustrated. I was pleased to hear writer/blogger Dr. Janelle Shane called out in the acknowledgements for contributions to the creation of this book, of whom I am a fan.

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.

Reminiscent of Monk and Robot though broader and darker, we're along for a calm inquisitive road novel with an earnest robot butler some moment after the world as they and we know it ended. Satirically enjoys itself in upending formulaic scenes and takes us to some imaginative places, surprisingly light fun.

Truly a perfect fun-house mirror to our future, present, and recent past. A thoughtful, precise, inspiring knife to the gut which Tchaikovsky twists with unparalleled empathy and insight.

A story of a robot who does not fully understand his own actions, and does not consciously believe in his own agency. A series of trials like Old Mebbeth's tasks each point a glowing and uncomfortable finger at one of the ways our society is utterly failing. Pinocchio on a modern odyssey of apocalyptic parables silently screaming at the top of their lungs to do something about what's wrong. Truly more Literature in here than I can shake a stick at. Sublime, beautiful, and painful to the core.

Unquestionably going to come back to this several times, hopefully with a book club where we can study one section in depth before moving to the next. An absolute banger.

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.