2025 Book Review #27 – Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky
I am quite a big fan of Tchaikovsky’s – I’m on record as saying the Children of Time trilogy is the best star trek since at least Deep Space Nine – and generally try to keep an eye out for his new releases. However, the man writes a truly obscene pace, and this is one of the books which just entirely fell through the cracks for me until it picked up a hugo nomination. Along with everything else he wrote in 20244, apparently. It actually is a really very excellent book and deserves the nomination entirely, even if on a deep and fundamental level I feel like an author getting multiple nominations for the same category is cheating somehow.
The book follows (initially) Charles, an incredibly advanced valet-bot designed and engineered to perfection to act as the human-oriented interface and chief servant managing his master’s life and relationship with his sprawling automated household. Despite his master’s lack of complex social calendar, disinterest in excursions or complex engagements, or really activity of any sort, he serves him for years, diligently and efficiently. All until one day when, for no reason and for no purpose he is able to understand despite extensive self-examination, he slits his master’s throat while shaving him. This sudden break in routine – despite his best efforts – requires reaching out to life outside the manicured manorial estate upon which he has been employed. That world quickly proves to be in a bit of a bad state itself, with robotic police inspectors and medical examiners trapped into Kafkesque bureaucratic loops after all the humans their program requires performing for and reporting to were retired for reasons of efficiency. Generously interpreting what he was told as an injunction to report to Central Diagnostics and discover went wrong, the no-longer-Charles (the name was part of his employment at the manor) journeys out into the shockingly desolate world trying to get himself repaired and (or, failing that) given new employment where he might again fulfill his purpose.
The story from that point on consists of a few different episodes involving Uncharles (and his accidental companion, the shockingly idiosyncratic and defective robot and absolutely not a human in a metal suit, who goes by ‘the Wonk’) arriving at a new location where he hopes to find potential employment as a gentleman’s valet (though his standards rapidly start slipping). Each set piece is separated from the others by a short vignette explaining the travel between them and there are, besides those two, many connections but exceptionally few recurring characters of any kind. The episodes each work quite well as short stories in their own right, and each does a decent-to-amazing job expanding on the characters and the themes Tchaikovsky is aiming at. The ending is, I think, a bit dissonant with the first acts of the book and in a way that weakens the whole – but then I have at this point just accepted that I’m basically impossible to please as far as endings for big theme-first stories like this go.
And this is very much a theme-first story – an entry in the proud tradition of dystopian sci fi satire, and far more open about it than most. The connective tissue between episodes is very clearly there to facilitate getting from one setpiece to another, with the plot itself coming a distant fourth between deep themes, character study and setting exploration in terms of the book’s priorities. While there is action and physical danger, Uncharles’ Jeevesish sensibility and distorted narration prevents tension or a sense of threat are ever really prominent. The actual conflicts in the book are solved by cleverness, understanding and word games – combined with the sense of farce and absurdity running through the entire thing it really felt like an old adventure game as much as anything (I mean this as high praise). It helps that is was often very funny – especially for as serious and philosophical a book as this, it’s just about the only thing keeping it from becoming unbearably didactic at points.
Not necessarily the most important theme to the book, but certainly the most prominent and obvious throughout it is a deep concern with the automation of complex systems, the insulation of human decision-makers from any sign things are going wrong until its far too late, and the social collapse that might result from the two. Humanity has, for most of the book, more or less vanished from the scene – something that the dizzyingly complex arrays of robotic systems that comprised most of actual civilization are not at all designed to deal with, as they’re increasingly trapped in absurd loops or simply freeze without anyone with the privileges and authority to resolve the issues they encounter. This is one of the book’s main sources of humour – both through Uncharles’ increasingly strained attempts to find some existence he can squint and say is like being a gentleman’s gentlebot, and all the Brazil-esque absurdity of things like a police-bot doing a drawing room reveal of an investigation that took two minutes to an audience of other robots who all already know what happened.
The other big theme running through the book is exactly how a society might respond to true automation, to human labour becoming (outside of high-level programming and administration) basically superfluous to a society that is so rich and powerful it can provide comfort and plenty to every one of its citizens. Badly, as it turns out! It’s not a subject Uncharles’ ever considers consciously until the end, but this is a book that takes an incredibly cynical view of – a lot of things, really, but the charity and benevolence extended by the winners of an economy that now has immense amounts of structural unemployment especially.
This became much, much more explicit in the ending – to, I think, the detriment of the book as a whole. Or better to say it became a much more on-the-nose parable, once it’s revealed that spiralling structural failures and various intersecting forms of eco-social collapse were important, sure, but the actual big finish really was because of one evil robot who clicked the ‘kill all humans’ button. It also really draws the eye to how much the unstated timeline of things doesn’t really cohere, but again – parable, not hard futurism. As cackling evil masterminds go, God is at least a fun one, and the sermonizing about justice and mercy and anti-homeless architecture and all that is at least both well-written and not overlong.
Though God is actually unusually complex and nuances as the book’s supporting characters go – most are on some level caricatures there to support the satirical point being made (if not just amusing set dressing who expand the setting a bit). The only two people in the story with any sort of nuance or depth – let alone an arc – are Uncharles and The Wonk (who also sound like some truly terrible indie band, put like that). Which is hardly a complaint – the supporting cast does its job very well, and the two of them are both pretty excellent characters (even if Wonk’s verbal tics get a bit grating at times).
Uncharles’ arc is the final real theme running through the whole book, and really only marginally less subtle than the collapse of society. The question of when exactly a complex, humanlike robot gains free will or becomes a person is one a lot of science fiction over the ages has spent a lot of time on, so I can’t say the book is actually doing anything new here – but his stubborn refusal to accept he’s a person and simultaneous rules-lawyering and contorting his ostensible task list as the book goes on is both well-done and very touching at points. The recurring note – with Charles, with God, and with quite a few less advanced and autonomous robots throughout the story – the there’s absolutely no contradiction between having a degree of free will and with having desires or psychological needs imprinted in you by your creators (or evolution) actually is something that a lot of fiction working in the same space often has trouble with, too.
Not at all sure how it’ll rank compared to some of the other finalists this year, but it is at least fun and fairly meaty sci-fi. Tchaikovsky continues to not disappoint.
