Title: Service Model
Author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
Publisher: Tor Books 2024
Genre: Science Fiction
Pages: 376
Rating: 5/5 stars
Reading Challenges: Cover Lover - Cityscape
Where I Got It: Library
To fix the world they must first break it, further.
Humanity is a dying breed, utterly reliant on artificial labor and service.
When a domesticated robot gets a nasty little idea downloaded into its core programming, they murder their owner. The robot discovers they can also do something else they never did before: They can run away.
Fleeing the household they enter a wider world they never knew existed, where the age-old hierarchy of humans at the top is disintegrating into ruins and an entire robot ecosystem devoted to human wellbeing is having to find a new purpose.
Sometimes all it takes is a nudge to overcome the limits of your programming.
I had absolutely no frame of reference going into this book. It was picked for my speculative fiction book club and I just dove in. Right away, I was intrigued by the narration by the robot. The writing took a bit to get used, but it was perfect for the characters and the story. We slowly orient ourselves in the world and attempt to understand what has happened in the manor. Once that is revealed, we begin our quest with Uncharles and slowly piece together the world as it stands. I loved the language, the characters, and the plot. We get a very fresh-feeling robot story wrapped in a post-apocalypse world. We get to see a future destroyed by humans and continued by robots. I loved that we get a big mystery aspect to the story while keeping our robot a robot. While Uncharles has its own thoughts and decisions, it is still a robot with all the logical thinking and inability to really imagine. I found this book to be very refreshing. I cannot wait to discuss this with my book club friends in June.
Next up on the TBR pile:
