Service Model

Elder Race was my introduction to him — a story that smuggled a deeply human portrait of depression inside a clever science fiction / fantasy dual-perspective structure. I five-starred it and figured that was a hard act to follow.

Service Model had me worried for a while. At 15% I was enjoying it but couldn't shake the feeling it might just be another "There Will Come Soft Rains" — a well-executed riff on a familiar premise, robots carrying on after humanity's end, poignant but not surprising. I set it down and read another book entirely. Then I came back, just to check.

The trap was sprung.

What followed was one of those reading experiences where I started carving out time I didn't have — a few chapters before bed, staying up until 2am, eventually finishing it on a plane to California. The book kept me genuinely uncertain about where it was going until the very end, which is rarer than it should be.

The world our protagonist moves through is one of total collapse. He is a service model — a robotic valet built to tend to the well-off residents of a manor — now adrift in a landscape of decay, destruction, and dysfunction. The other robots in this world have responded to that collapse in ways ranging from tragic to horrifying, their programming curling inward or misfiring catastrophically without the humans they were built to serve. Somehow he perseveres, and the book is quietly interested in why.

He starts the story as Charles. Early on, his sometime companion — a robot whose own damage has taken a different, stranger shape — rechristens him Uncharles, and the name sticks. Their dynamic is both joyful and poignantly sad in a way that's hard to articulate without spoiling it, and The Wonk gave me something to root for during the stretches when everything else seemed irredeemably bleak.

Tchaikovsky is doing something particular with his mentally ill robots, and I don't think it's accidental. Uncharles insists throughout that he doesn't feel pain or emotion. But the way he describes his inner state — things that aren't good or bad but just are — belies that completely. He's feeling pain and grief. It's shaping every decision he makes. He just doesn't have the framework to call it what it is, or perhaps won't let himself. I find something in that I can't quite name, and I don't think I need to.

The ending didn't give him what I was hoping for. It gave him something better suited — hopeful without being explicitly happy. I think that's exactly right for this story, and I'm still thinking about it. Several more Tchaikovsky books are already in my to-read pile and will surface sooner than later. First, though, I need some Scalzi fluff to cleanse my emotional palette. This one took something out of me, in the best way.

Five stars.