You all know I’m truly, madly, deeply in love with Murderbot until the end of time. So obviously, when a publisher describes a new release in any terms that compare it to the diaries of my most beloved Sec Unit, I’m going to buy the book immediately.
Damn marketers know what they’re doing.
And what they’re doing is lying through their teeth. Service Model provided me with exactly 0% of my expected quota of explosions, firefights, and snarky narration.
So, why am I still recommending this book to you?
As annoyed as I was that Service Model didn’t meet my expectations, I just couldn’t stop coming back for more of this slow-paced robotic adventure.
I guess it was the humour that kept sucking me in. The whole story is one long, politely dark joke: A robot whose existence has made humans obsolete now finds himself obsolete due to lack of humans.
Charles, the butler robot in question, embarks on a quest to find a new job. But it’s not easy to find a human in need of a nice pot of tea and a close shave in the post-apocalyptic world he finds outside the grounds of his former employer’s sheltered country estate.
Charles’ quest for employment leads him on a Wizard of Oz style adventure that gives you as the reader a walking tour of the world post-apocalypse, and it’s riddled with too-true observations expressed through the hilariously polite narration of its C-3PO like main character.
Charles is intermittently accompanied by The Wonk, whose sarcasm provides a hilarious counterpoint to Charles’ genteel programming, and whose decisions are often the only thing that keeps the story moving forward, since Charles, like Arthur Dent in A Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is what Brandon Sanderson would call “a protagonist who refuses to protag.”
He is not, as Charles so often reminds The Wonk, capable of self-determination.
Even in the epilogue, we leave our stubbornly robotic protagonist still refusing to admit he’s experienced any character development, or that, in fact, a robot would be programmed with the capability of either being a character or developing. As readers we’re left shaking our heads at his annoying yet endearing stubbornness, while our subconscious takeaway is that Charles is far more human in his stubborn refusal to be human than most main characters are in their desperate efforts to put their man-made humanity on display.
So, okay, fine, I grudgingly but thoroughly enjoyed listening to Service Model.
And I think if you approach the book for what it is, you’ll enjoy this post-apocalyptic comedy, too. I’d recommend Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model to anyone who enjoys science fiction that says something about the current state of our world and hopes to steer us in a better direction.
Just don’t go into it expecting Charles to be Murderbot.
