Skip to main content

Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky (review)

 


I never expected existentialism to be so funny. Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky is about a robot’s search for meaning. Or maybe it is about a robot who doesn’t know he is searching for meaning, but he is nonetheless. He also doesn’t know he is going on a quest, but he is as sure as if his name were Bilbo. His name is not Bilbo. His name is Uncharles (long story).

Uncharles is a is a robot valet. A gentleman’s gentleman (or rather a gentleman’s gentlerobot). The human society is crumbling and does not have much need for valets anymore. But Uncharles only knows what his programming is telling him, and that is that he needs to serve, and specifically to serve humans. That is going to be rather difficult as there aren’t many humans left alive in this broken world.

Being a robot, he has to follow his instructions, his task list. If those tasks are now impossible to do now, then he has to get creative about fulfilling his tasks. The first task is to find out what is wrong with him. But when he goes to the diagnostic center, it is soon apparent that there is more wrong with the world than just him. He takes on another task, and another, trying to find something that will stick, something that will give him purpose. But nothing ever quite works out.

The story is funny, but it is also a cautionary tale. Humans have made some bad choices in this world, choosing comfort over, well, anything else. But humans always have tended to take the easy way out. The evidence is apparent by looking at what we have done to our planet. In the story, apparently adding robots didn’t help. Things are falling apart and no one seems to know who to talk to, to get things fixed. Uncharles doesn’t really care about any of that. He just wants a job, just wants to fulfil his purpose. “Want” isn’t exactly the right word. Robots don’t want anything. They just do what they are supposed to do. They don’t have free will. At least that is what Uncharles keeps saying. There is a childlike innocence to the robot. And while Uncharles would be the first to say that robots can’t grow, they can’t evolve, after he makes a few of his creative decisions, you start to wonder.

Star Liner

Comments

  1. Jennifer LancasterJanuary 1, 2025 at 8:39 PM

    Sounds pretty interesting in this time of advancing machine intelligence and hype around it.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu

My first experience with cyberpunk as a genre of science fiction was Neuromancer by William Gibson. Neuromancer was one of the early works that defined the cyberpunk genre. It was insanely influential. It won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award. But for me, it just did not resonate. I had a hard time visualizing the concepts. It left a bad taste in my mouth for cyberpunk. I mostly avoided the genre. Then a couple of years ago I read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson which is cyberpunk (although some people say it is a parody of cyberpunk). Whatever, I liked it. I recently picked up All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu and it immediately became apparent to me that this was cyberpunk. Julia Z is the main character, and I think this is going to be the start of a series following her. She is a hacker (hence cyberpunk). She has got herself in trouble and so she lives on the margins, barely making it. Then a lawyer asks her for her help. His wife has been kidnapped. The ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Walls Don't Work

  At the peak of the Roman Empire, the empire stretched from the Persian Gulf to Brittain, from northern Africa to southern Germany. But the great conquering emperors like Trajan learned that conquering land was easy compared to holding on to it.   In fact, Trajan’s successor, Hadrian, was known for shrinking the empire and consolidating Trajan’s gains into a more defensible set of holdings. This made him not popular among his generals who wanted glory and spoils. But he understood if you stretch yourself too thin, you can wind up with nothing. To consolidate the Empire’s holdings in Brittain, he had a wall constructed from Solway Firth to the Tyne River. Construction began in the year 122 AD. The Empire had never been able to subdue the highland Scottish tribes, so this wall (Hadrian’s Wall) divided the “barbarians from the Romans.” It was a solid piece of engineering with forts and towers scattered along it to keep the “barbarians” out. Hadrian’s successor, Antonius Pius...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Linear Nature of Time

    Go Go back Go back to the time before Before you did it Before they did it Before it was done to you Before the toast fell on the floor Before the catastrophe Before the mistake Before time’s scars Before   Go Go back Redeem it Rework it Fix it Go back   No you cannot Go back Star Liner
Post a Comment
Read more