Fiction Reviews
Service Model
(2024) Adrian Tchaikovsky, Tor, £22, hrdbk, 375pp, ISBN 978-1-035-04566-2
This may be Adrian T’s finest novel to date, essentially Jerzy Kosinski’s 1971 Being There (filmed with Peter Sellers in 1979) with robots. Charles is programmed to serve a rich man in a crumbling mission, and maintains the duty with calm fanaticism despite realising that he has murdered his master.
With many, if not all robots wearing down and getting confused in their programming and the police robots unsure if they can even arrest him, Charles is cast out into the wider world to seek repairs at a robot maintenance depot. There, he finds that the depot itself has malfunctioned and unable to cope with the huge backlog of robots seeking maintenance, so they are crushing them all into cubes to shorten the queue. Charles, now renamed Uncharles as he has no master to name him, is rescued by a mysterious seemingly free willed robot called The Wonk, an anarchic freedom fighter, convinced that the robots are struggling with a virus that is giving them the free will she already appears to bear. Together, Twonk and Uncharles go on an epic road trip quest through the wastelands in search of a largely now absentee human race, and encounter various bizarre, often dangerous characters, including a farmer who suppresses his staff like slaves on a plantation because that is how men used to do it, librarians who think they are storing knowledge when they are actually destroying it, and a powerful entity who may or may not be, as it claims God.
The interactions between Uncharles and Twonk are delightful, often reduced to a Becketian Waiting for Godot absurdity. Twonk wants to set Uncharles free while he just wants some Master to tell him what to do, tea to brew and beds to make.
Their humour is set against an increasingly dystopian backdrop. What happened to the bulk of humanity? Why are the robots in such a state of decay and confusion? What drove Charles to kill his master and then forget that he did so or why? Will he do it again?
Chapters have cryptic titles echoing dystopian and dark literature. K3FK-4 – Kafka, 4W-L – Orwell, D4NT-A – Dante, for example, and it against this bleak backdrop that the incredibly humanised robots make their journey in search for answers that come as a superb surprise, though Uncharles seems to miss what will be all too apparent to most readers early on regarding the delightfully resourceful and sarcastic Wonk.
This is an ambitious and joyful, thrilling read, determined and highly inventive throughout. Adrian Tchaikovsky probably had a blast writing this, and I certainly did in reading it.
Sometimes, the protagonists get into very dangerous situations and the reader feels as concerned for their welfare as they might for people, as the robots bear very individual personalities, not just the central characters, but minor ones too. Uncharles meets a Jester robot, programmed to entertain, and still going through his act while waiting to be fixed, both chained to his programming and coming over as wishing that he wasn’t. Uncharles sees and senses his tragedy while failing to see that it is very similar to his own obsessive programmed drive to serve and slave to some human master. Where it leads him and The Wonk is the driving force behind this simply wonderful novel.
Arthur Chappell
See also Mark's take on Service Model, Jonathan's opinion and Steven's review of Service Model.
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