Service Model

Charles, a robot valet, unexpectedly murders his employer. He then sets out on a journey to Diagnostics to find out why he did it, and starts a heroes journey of sorts. Through seven episodes, mostly accompanied by the Wonk, who he meets at Diagnostics, he journeys through a societal landscape where humans are mostly dead or scrabbling to survive.

So what happened? The Wonk wants it to be that robots have obtained self-awareness. Charles just wants to be a valet for a human, but is complex enough to act unhappily at some of his opportunities. Even though he claims to be incapable of unhappiness.

I found myself really liking Charles, but that may be my internal tendency toward the satisfaction of ticking off tasks on a task list, which is what a lot of Charles' internal monologue is about. The overall story is good, but it is overly long (7 episodes in Charles' quest) and I just wanted to get on with it in a few places.

This book starts with a bunch of absurd humor, and as the story goes on, that humor gets mixed in with the darkness of the dystopian setting and overall plot. It kind of resembles Tchaikovsky's Cage of Souls, but whereas that book was more adventure, this one is more dark comedy.

Tchaikovsky does manage to pull off the combination well. The main character, being a robot, brings a bunch of robotic aloofness to the narration, which actually works pretty well with the overall mixture of simultaneously aloof and dark tone of the book. While the main character keeps encountering perhaps too-poignant and neatly tied up episodes of his adventure, like the hero in some sort of a fable (which is where the comparison to Cage of Souls comes to mind), the character is sufficiently compelling to carry the book forward.

The conclusion to the overall plot could perhaps be more satisfying; it, too, tries to be rather poignant. The setting could perhaps be more fleshed out and less fable-like, but it works with the structure of the story.