Almost too prolific to keep up with, Adrian Tchaikovsky turns to comedic futuristic satire with Service Model, in which a robot valet, in a world teeming with robots, finds itself on the run after inexplicably murdering its wastrel human master. The author clearly relished depicting a future dystopia of human and robotic disintegration; many of the cameo characters can readily be imagined as outre depictions in a Terry-Pritchett-style movie. Tchaikovsky is a superb plotter and world builder, and the story steams along toward a hotly anticipated climax. What surprised me during the read was the poignancy imparted to the central mechanistic robot, and Service Model can also be read as a deeply thought “what if” offering a vision worth considering during our current era of AI advances and debates.
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