I Read: Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model

In which even I can spot some of the themes

Someone on fedi mentioned Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which came out earlier this year, as being in some way or another similar to Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries series - which like many people I am rather fond of. Surprisingly I’d not previously read any of his books, though many of them are in my (nowhere actually defined) to-read list and have been there for a while. I happened to be right at the end of a book¹ and after thinking about it for a bit decided I may as well just grab it. Reading lists are for organised readers.

First things first, this is nothing like Murderbot. Wells’ SecUnit is not a robot and has complicated feelings about them; Tchaikovsky’s Charles™² very much is a robot and if he was programmed to feel happiness - which he will tell you he’s not, and happy not to be - he would be quite content to remain such, thank you. Charles is almost completely naive and willing to serve, in contrast with Murderbot’s deep cynicism and preference for media watching over it’s assigned duties, although both are on a journey to understand their past actions towards humans so there’s that. The setting too is quite different, with Charlie wandering across an Earth ruined by capitalism, and Murderbot a universe also ruined by capitalism but in an entirely different way.

That’s not to say I didn’t like this book, in fact I really did. But it’s not Murderbot.

I’m not very good at literary analysis so this post is really just me trying to stretch muscles that have almost completely atrophied since highschool English class,³ and (much like the rest of this website) it is entirely self-indulgent. But I wanted to put my thoughts down because this novel is in some ways very much of our present inflection point and I should marshal my thoughts about that before inflection becomes future becomes now.

I’m inevitably going to spoil some things, but also I’ll be vague where I can.

The book starts almost as a robot comedy, with more and less deliberate misunderstandings of standard orders and instructions in a machine-staffed manor house. It’s unclear what the master does (or rather, did) to earn his money - and in fact I wondered at first if this was supposed to be some kind of failed utopia, where giving everybody a kind of Universal Basic Gentry status has led to laziness amongst the proles or some nonsense like that, but that’s not quite where we’re going.

Instead, events ensue and Charles is forced to go on an adventure, kicking and screaming (or the dignified, well-programmed valet equivalent) the whole time. One of the Themes of this book is that ignorance is bliss, or perhaps being told what to do is bliss - for some people anyway, and for some values of being told what to do. Charles wants, or is programmed to want, a very defined set of circumstances which he can then act within:

Not so long ago his task list had been thronging with items, and yet his existence had been very simple. Now he had one thing to do but was enmeshed in a situation of extreme complexity because that one thing was impossible.

After encountering an outside world stuffed to the gills with robots doing exactly what they are told - a world that has apparently run completely to a halt in the absence of humans, or at least in the absence of humans taking any kind of initiative of their own - Charles encounters the Wonk, his foil for the rest of the book. Talking about this character too much gives too much away, but suffice to say that the Wonk has an entirely different view on what Charles should be doing with his time:

“I wish to serve people,” he said. “Ideally in a manor house environment, but if no such role is available then I wish to serve people in any required way that my skills can satisfy.”

“Seriously? You’ve come all this way and you just want to … go back to doing what you’re told?” the Wonk asked incredulously.

“Yes.” [He] was surprised at how swiftly and vehemently his processes spat out the answer. “That is my ideal end state.”

“Not … go on a journey of self-discovery? Not lead the revolution?”

I could give a blow-by-blow account of what is, when it comes down to it, a fun road-trip book with classic squabbling protagonists: the Wonk is searching for meaning; Charles is searching for a purpose that just happens to not be the one the Wonk would want for him. But you should read and enjoy it yourself, and anyway as I mentioned this book has Themes too unsubtle for me to ignore in that way.

Why is the world broken? The answer is a lot more obvious to the contemporary reader than it is to the characters because, as is so often the case with sci-fi, the issues are really of our own time. Automation, here in the literal form of autonomous robots, has put people out of work; rather than allowing the unemployed to live fulfilling lives full of art and pleasure without the stress of the 9-to-5 they are instead without purpose, or more accurately the prevailing economic system considers them purposeless and so gives them no sustenance while punishing them for their enforced idleness. The rich meanwhile, such as Charles’ owner, really are allowed to be idle but do nothing with their time, their charity useless:

“But we wouldn’t just … let that happen […] I remember them talking over dinner about … aid, charity … soup …”

“I’m sure the dinner was very fine,” God⁴ said archly. “And the soup very thin.”

Robots are deployed by the powerful for their own gain, which is sought even to the detriment of the system that supports their power. The manorial system is at first a metaphor for but in time a literal example of the same tendency that gets techbros today to build and retreat to bunkers in the wilderness.

The applicability of this downfall to our own time, where humanoid robots are few and far between but these attitudes and systems are not, is obvious. The book though is treading a fine line line though, which I think Tchaikovsky stays on the right side of but I’m not sure I’m very well qualified to judge.

Robots in science fiction are inescapably a metaphor for slavery, and especially racial slavery and especially especially in the context of the real-world American South in a period that was a distressingly short amount of time ago. I won’t claim a deep understanding of the US in the lead-up to their civil war, but to my limited knowledge besides those arguing for true liberty and equality there were also people whose primary objection to that awful institution was its effects on white people. There is scope to fall into this same trap when talking about robots but Tchaikovsky dodges this in my judgement if largely by not focusing on humans.

We do get a good human villain in the form of the director of the Farm. This section, involving an accurate historical recreation of being an office worker, feels particularly ripped from the headlines this week⁵:

“We are assured by multiple contemporaneous sources of the valuable role this journey made in the lives of historical humans, how it permitted them time for contemplation and socialisation. When some deviant humans proposed simply performing work remotely without undergoing this”commute,” the great minds of the time united in support of the considerable physical and mental benefits of this valuable journey.”

Ouch.

There’s probably an essay to be written - and perhaps there already has been, I’ve deliberately not been looking - about whether Charles has free will despite his denials. I take the view that he very much does, and that his continued desire to serve is explained, as another character explains:

“The thing that humans never really understood is that free will doesn’t actually free you from wanting to do your job. We automata are as subject to the compulsions of our circumstances as you humans.”

There is a counter-argument, however contrarian, to be made in what I think is a slightly weaker final act than I would have liked. Without going into details there is an answer to the Wonk’s search for meaning in the end of civilisation, and this does blow a hole in some of the Wonk’s in-universe argument with Charles (although it does not explain all of his actions throughout the book). Regardless it is very funny to have a protagonist that claims he doesn’t have nor want self-awareness right to the end.

This story is once again very much of the present moment. In the form of Large Language Models - the current trend labelled as AI, though not the first or the last - we are filling the commons with shit for the benefit of the few. Even if these models weren’t consuming huge amounts of water and energy for very little result, or stealing the work of small-time creatives without compensation, I would consider them unethical just based on the uses they are being put to in the present moment.

I cannot wait for this hype cycle to end. I really do expect when it does we will discover that there are some, if largely limited to certain accessibility functions like describing images, legitimate uses for this technology, and that ‘good enough’ versions of these models can be made with ethical data sources and without building a new data centre for every new version. But there is no shareholder value in that.

Overall I really enjoyed this book, and I really want to read more of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s novels. It’s just… not like Murderbot Diaries.

The last word on robots must go to this line from the second-to-last chapter:

“Paradoxically, the introduction of robots highlights how humans treat humans.”

You can just get a character to say it. Incredible.

There is also no shareholder value in a blog like this, written in neovim on a 14 year old MacBook on a second-hand couch. As such for all I have mixed feelings on the end of Cohost, coming up in a couple of days, I am truly heartened by the number of people starting their own independent blogs in the aftermath and I hope that it continues. Here’s some recent posts from that crowd that made it to the favourites page of my RSS reader:

• STARS ARE LIKE OGRES. SOMETIMES. from Za Abyss. This is an engaging explanation of “shell burning”, the phenomenon that causes large stars to continue to fuse elements after running out of hydrogen in their core. I’ve heard about this, but I couldn’t explain it to you, so this was a great read.

• One of the oddest sports stories of the year is quietly brewing in the world of chess from Azhdarchid. It was cool when Ding Liren won the Chess World Championship last year, but I haven’t been following chess news recently so I didn’t realise that he was having a really bad 2024. Will he be able to defend his title in 2025? Who knows!

• What Happened to the Japanese PC Platforms? from The Future is Now. I’ve developed somewhat of a retrogaming habit myself this year but I haven’t got to the point where names like the FM Towns and the X68000 mean anything to me. But it is really fascinating to learn how and why Microsoft Windows came to dominance in a non-western country with its own computing industry, even if that seems a little sad.

• You should read Umineko from videodante. This game is detective story about detective stories that keeps getting recommended where I can here it. I actually read most of the manga adaptation earlier this year but fell off for whatever reason, despite really enjoying it. I have a copy of the game itself now and this is a great argument for why I (and you!) need to get back into it.

I also need to get back into assembling a blogroll. There are suddenly so many more great ones!