Book Review: ‘Service Model’

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s new book, Service Model, follows the picaresque adventures of an android valet as he wanders around a post-apocalyptic world trying to execute his task list. Although civilization is in rubble, Uncharles – the service model of the title — is resolutely intent on finding a master whose laundry he can iron and whose clothes he can lay out.

Tchaikovsky is best known for writing multiple series of space opera: thrillers of the future with blasters and lasers galore. Service Model, however, is an intentional change of genre and the wry Service Model, never steps off Earth.

The blurbs hail it as a mix between Martha Wells’ Murderbot—about a laconic, self-conscious, reformed mercenary killer robot — and John Scalzi’s Redshirts — about protagonists who become increasingly aware of their status as protagonists in someone else’s story. And there are similarities, But it has an equally close connection to TJ Klune’s In the Lives of Puppets.

Where Klune pulls deeply on the Pinocchio story for Puppets’ androids in a post-human future, Tchaikovsky takes the Wizard of Oz for his tin man’s adventures. Though he continuously, and fascinatingly perceives her as another tin man, Uncharles even develops a Dorothy when he encounters The Wonk at the Diagnostics department of Central Services.

Uncharles was called Charles when he carried out an unfortunate, fatal razor slice while shaving his master. This murder — which even his memory logs cannot explain or even fully describe — kicks off the plot. After an investigation into the murder by a comically bad android police detective, the AI house majordomo uncouples from the valet, effectively exiling Charles. His search for a software fix and then new station takes up the rest of the book.

He adventures through a wasteland mostly denuded of humans, meeting a variety of other robots fulfilling their tasks in ways that their instructors had not intended: from a repair station that clears its waiting room with a compactor, to a library that archives information down to its minimal binary units, from war robots that must continually fight and then consume one another, to a court robot that has decided everybody is guilty.

All the while, The Wonk—and eventually Uncharles—consider whether Uncharles’ own emerging abilities to deal with life are evidence that he has gone beyond the coding of his own “human-facing” abilities to show symptoms of the mythic “Protagonist virus.” Which is just another way to say, does he have a brain? I won’t spoil the ending, but if you’ve seen the film of the Wizard of Oz, you won’t need spoilers.

No longer just a fictional concept, AI grows ever harder to write about. We feel like children when faced with it, so employ children’s myths to confront it. The Wizard of Oz is a good start for a satirical allegory and — like Gulliver’s Travels which Service Model also resembles — the simplicity of the plot’s premises belie a philosophical depth as they unfold, play out, and layer up. As with Jonathan Swift, Tchaikovsky relishes the absurdities he has invented and, though both the humor and its content can be bleak, it’s often delicious and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.

There ends up being no place like home for Uncharles and The Wonk, but how they find a place for themselves in a mostly post-human future is worth reading.