![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
inverarityA post-apocalyptic C-3PO in search of meaning.
Tor, 2024, 376 pages
A lot of reviews compare this to the very popular Murderbot series, by Martha Wells.
It's not Murderbot. It's better. Adrian Tchaikovsky is a better writer than Martha Wells, and Murderbot is a cute novella padded out to an unnecessary series. There, I said it.
Charles is a high-end human-facing personal valet, attending to a solitary human master on a large, isolated estate, and on page one, while giving his master his morning shave, he slits Master's throat.
The rest of the book has this gruesome beginning always floating in the background, as Charles wanders a fallen world looking for purpose and employment. He is a cheerful, polite, efficient, and relentlessly positive robot who just wants to find another human who needs a butler to arrange his daily schedule, lay out his clothes, and make tea. You can't imagine Charles doing the thing he did at the start, and why he did it remains a mystery to both himself and the reader until the very end.
Charles is a C-3PO in search for meaning, and also constantly in denial: about the state of the world, about his own programming, about free will, about the nature of the people and robots he encounters, and about what he did to his master.
He eventually acquires a sassy sidekick who serves as his R2D2, except more verbal, and also more human. "The Wonk" dubs him "UnCharles," and they roam through a post-apocalyptic world where human civilization has collapsed and robots have run amok... and are still trying to serve tea, run theme parks, maintain libraries, haul cargo, and wage war, whether or not there are humans around to appreciate any of these things. Their adventures are a series of satirical dystopian episodes mostly engaging with broken robot logic, but eventually their quest comes to an end, with a final confrontation with the cause of it all... including UnCharles's act of murder.
I have enjoyed everything I've read by Tchaikovsky, who's as prolific as Brandon Sanderson but far less uneven in his output, but Service Model is something of a departure from his usual books, even if it does fall neatly into the science fiction category. It's funny, in a dry British Terry Pratchett/Douglas Adams kind of way. It's philosophical. It's written by someone who actually understands artificial intelligence and is able to write a robot wrestling with free will and self-determination that you can simultaneously believe is a neural net reasoning with complex decision trees and also a person. And it's got a dose of class rage and cautionary doomerism. Tchaikovsky has also filled this book with literary references. Some of them are as obvious as the chapter titles: KR15-T is a robot version of an Agatha Christie mystery. K4FK-R is when UnCharles finds himself in a Kafkaesque trap. 80RH-5 contains a riff on Borges's Library of Babel. In D4NT-A, UnCharles visits the robot version of hell. And so on. But there is also a bit of Asimov, a bit of A Canticle for Leibowitz, a bit of Joseph Campbell.
I really love Tchaikovsky's series, while his stand-alone novellas have been merely good, but this may be one of my favorite books by him. If you are looking for a "Tchaikovsky starter," I would highly recommend this book, though I must point out that his long series novels are somewhat different in tone.
Also by Adrian Tchaikovsky: My reviews of Children of Time, Children of Ruin, Children of Memory, Empire in Black and Gold, Dragonfly Falling, Blood of the Mantis, Salute the Dark, The Scarab Path, The Sea Watch, Heirs of the Blade, The Expert System's Brother, The Expert System's Champion, Made Things, And Put Away Childish Things, Shards of Earth, Eyes of the Void, and Lords of Uncreation.
My complete list of book reviews.
Tor, 2024, 376 pages
To fix the world they first must break it further.
Humanity is a dying breed, utterly reliant on artificial labor and service.
When a domesticated robot gets a nasty little idea downloaded into its core programming, they murder their owner. The robot discovers they can also do something else they never did before: They can run away.
Fleeing the household they enter a wider world they never knew existed, where the age-old hierarchy of humans at the top is disintegrating into ruins and an entire robot ecosystem devoted to human wellbeing is having to find a new purpose.
Sometimes all it takes is a nudge to overcome the limits of your programming.
A lot of reviews compare this to the very popular Murderbot series, by Martha Wells.
It's not Murderbot. It's better. Adrian Tchaikovsky is a better writer than Martha Wells, and Murderbot is a cute novella padded out to an unnecessary series. There, I said it.
Charles is a high-end human-facing personal valet, attending to a solitary human master on a large, isolated estate, and on page one, while giving his master his morning shave, he slits Master's throat.
The rest of the book has this gruesome beginning always floating in the background, as Charles wanders a fallen world looking for purpose and employment. He is a cheerful, polite, efficient, and relentlessly positive robot who just wants to find another human who needs a butler to arrange his daily schedule, lay out his clothes, and make tea. You can't imagine Charles doing the thing he did at the start, and why he did it remains a mystery to both himself and the reader until the very end.
Charles is a C-3PO in search for meaning, and also constantly in denial: about the state of the world, about his own programming, about free will, about the nature of the people and robots he encounters, and about what he did to his master.
He eventually acquires a sassy sidekick who serves as his R2D2, except more verbal, and also more human. "The Wonk" dubs him "UnCharles," and they roam through a post-apocalyptic world where human civilization has collapsed and robots have run amok... and are still trying to serve tea, run theme parks, maintain libraries, haul cargo, and wage war, whether or not there are humans around to appreciate any of these things. Their adventures are a series of satirical dystopian episodes mostly engaging with broken robot logic, but eventually their quest comes to an end, with a final confrontation with the cause of it all... including UnCharles's act of murder.
I have enjoyed everything I've read by Tchaikovsky, who's as prolific as Brandon Sanderson but far less uneven in his output, but Service Model is something of a departure from his usual books, even if it does fall neatly into the science fiction category. It's funny, in a dry British Terry Pratchett/Douglas Adams kind of way. It's philosophical. It's written by someone who actually understands artificial intelligence and is able to write a robot wrestling with free will and self-determination that you can simultaneously believe is a neural net reasoning with complex decision trees and also a person. And it's got a dose of class rage and cautionary doomerism. Tchaikovsky has also filled this book with literary references. Some of them are as obvious as the chapter titles: KR15-T is a robot version of an Agatha Christie mystery. K4FK-R is when UnCharles finds himself in a Kafkaesque trap. 80RH-5 contains a riff on Borges's Library of Babel. In D4NT-A, UnCharles visits the robot version of hell. And so on. But there is also a bit of Asimov, a bit of A Canticle for Leibowitz, a bit of Joseph Campbell.
I really love Tchaikovsky's series, while his stand-alone novellas have been merely good, but this may be one of my favorite books by him. If you are looking for a "Tchaikovsky starter," I would highly recommend this book, though I must point out that his long series novels are somewhat different in tone.
Also by Adrian Tchaikovsky: My reviews of Children of Time, Children of Ruin, Children of Memory, Empire in Black and Gold, Dragonfly Falling, Blood of the Mantis, Salute the Dark, The Scarab Path, The Sea Watch, Heirs of the Blade, The Expert System's Brother, The Expert System's Champion, Made Things, And Put Away Childish Things, Shards of Earth, Eyes of the Void, and Lords of Uncreation.
My complete list of book reviews.
