Service Model.

Andrei Tchaikovsky landed a pair of nominations for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel, one of them for Service Model, a dark comedy set in a dystopian future and starring a robot valet who finds that he’s killed his master and no longer understands his purpose.

Charles is the valet, and when the novel opens, he finds his master in bed with his throat cut by his razor, and an investigation leads to the inevitable conclusion that Charles is the culprit. Charles takes himself to Diagnostics, although along the way he stops at some other manors, only to find that there aren’t any humans anywhere else, either. At Diagnostics, he realizes that the entire bureaucratic setup has been brought to a halt, with any robots who show up to wait in the unmoving line sent off for scrap, and The Wonk, who seems to be hanging out in Diagnostics but maybe not working there, tells him that he’s developed free will, so he should go ‘live’ outside of service. Charles, whom the Wonk dubs Uncharles, can’t quite grasp that, and spends most of the book on a quest for some human to serve, mostly with the Wonk at his (its) side.

Service Model combines elements of farce and picaresque novels to explore some fundamental questions that go beyond robots or so-called AI. Charles is searching for meaning when the meaning he believed in for his entire existence isn’t just erased, but completely defied, like someone who grows up in one religion and has a sudden experience or realization that the religion is false. Imagine an evangelical Christian turned atheist who can’t give up all of the trappings of the former belief system, and keeps looking for reasons to continue their previous way of life. Even in the face of undeniable evidence that his worldview is false – Charles and the Wonk meet a robot that calls itself God, who turns out to be neither omnipotent nor infallible – Charles can’t give up his programming.

Because Charles is a machine, not a human, Tchaikovsky – who says he was inspired by a scene in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe – pushes his quest to ridiculous extremes, like some sort of robotum ad absurdum. Charles’s source code says he must have a human to serve, even when there isn’t a suitable human, or any human, in sight. It reads as a commentary on the limitations of “AI,” even if it can supposedly rewrite its own code, and on our misplaced faith in these tools to think for us. Garbage in, garbage out. The solution Uncharles finds ultimately requires the intervention of a human.

Tchaikovsky uses peril quite liberally, almost to the point of parodying the picaresque genre, as Charles ends up in one ridiculous situation after another, often requiring the help of The Wonk or some other force, including just sheer luck, to get out of being shut down or decommissioned or otherwise ceasing to exist. It gets a little tiresome because when he’s on the verge of extinction with 250 pages left, you’re pretty sure he’s going to make it out all right, and there are a couple of situations Charles escapes just because he has to move to the next plot point. Most of those sections do work in spite of their absurdity, however, because Tchaikovsky has such a deft hand with black humor, and in Charles he has created one of the best unintentionally funny characters I’ve seen in a while. (I think Tchaikovsky might be the humorist-satirist that people say that Gary Shteyngart is.) You can just appreciate Service Model as a quixotic tale, where The Wonk is Charles’s Sancho Panza, but I think its great strength is what’s below the surface, with a deeply humanistic bent and a clear philosophy on the limitations and potential harms of technology.

Of the six Hugo nominees, I’ve read two in full, this one and T. Kingfisher’s A Sorceress Comes to Call, and right now I’m almost through Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup. All are good enough to win; I think Kingfisher’s might be my favorite, but Service Model has a lot more to say, and if Hugo voters consider that aspect it’s probably the superior choice. That said, I have a copy of Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time on hold at the library, and I think that might be the actual favorite.