(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
There a re a great many superstars of the literary sci-fi genre, authors whose minds not only go there but who are then, almost miraculously, able to take their wildly imaginative musings and doing something profoundly impressive them.
One of the leading stars of this pantheon of imagination give a ticket to ride to anywhere it wants and going the greatest and most beguilingly thoughtful of all journeys is Adrian Tchaikovsky, a British author whose output is prodigious but whose quality of storytelling is rigorously, enthrallingly good, no matter where his wondrously malleable imagination takes him.
His latest masterpiece of a novel is Service Model, a somewhat-underwhelming title that belies the incredibly nuanced and often heartfelt story that lies within.
In this future-set story, robots are everywhere, and so, freed from drudgery and the rigours of the onerous everyday, humanity is free to what it likes when it likes; paradise should be just around the corner, right?
Wait, wait, no so fast because what ends up happening is that society begins to fracture and breakdown, and while that’s bad for the people involved who die by dark degrees, it’s almost worse for the robots who have been programmed to a slavish extent to only exist in the context of orders from those deemed to be their masters.
What happens if they’re no longer around, or if they are, manifestly unable to give the orders that make robots like Charles, a well-mannered valet looking after a member of society’s manor-dwelling elite, feel like they are fulfilling their human-given purpose?
The valet’s single task advance to the next stage. It received the proper ticked reward for progress towards completion. With new purpose it strode inside and the door closed.
What happens, my now-absent friends, is a world where all the robots are caught in endless loops of highly-programmed indecision, the kind of endlessly corrosive infinity loop where purpose is repeatedly, almost desperately sought – as is observed over and over in Service Model, robots don’t have emotions but they have a digital equivalent and it is not happy and more than a little panicked – and where the end of the world is not a Terminator-like orgy of highly executed destructive self determination, but rather a slow round and round and round again pattern of purpose sought and never, ever again.
This doesn’t affect Charles at the beginning of the novel; he is calmly and faithfully ensconced in a manor house in the better part of a city where tree-lined driveways and strong metal gates keep the world beyond rather happily at bay.
Turns out that’s not a bad idea because the world has gone right royally to sh*t and while the people in the manor houses go about their lives in imperious seclusion, aided and abetted by an army of robotic staff who thrive on knowing what they need to do and when, and drawing great pleasure (well, not pleasure but a sense of programming fulfilled which it turns out is important for robots like Charles) from it, society outside is well and truly and rather disastrously borked.
Charles in well insulated from this until one day when something goes quite terribly wrong with his programming and he has to hit the road where he discovers the world is well and truly broken and not even remotely capable of restoring a sense of box-ticking, schedule-observing “satisfaction” to him.
What results of the mother of all titanically self realisational journeys as Charles has to confront the irrationality and illogicality of a world that cares not for well-structured programming and its consequential fulfillment which, it seems, is happening less and less in a world where being told what to do is more of a digital noose around the neck than any kind of existential empowerment.
Put simply, with no humans around, and society more broken than an electronic item just past warranty, there’s no one around to validate and affirm Charles’ programming, and while he endearingly and stubbornly tries to make that happen, despite great danger to himself and in the face of monstrously big and highly nonsensical challenges that could end him, much of Service Model is about what happens when he has to learn, and lordy doesn’t he fight this, stand on his own two badly-scuffed feet.
While Service Model does tackle some incredibly important ideas about self-determination, value, worth and belonging, it does so in an entertainingly humorous fashion much of the time which proves that, in the hands of a masterful writer like Tchaikovsky, comedy can be a damning weapon of accusation indeed.
In fact, throughout much of the book, as you laugh at the absurdity of all manner of narrative twists and turns, you will suddenly realise with an almost palpable jolt that the accusatory hand of judgement is being well and truly pointed at you and all of society even as you giggle at the highly amusing irrationality of it all.
He made another motion towards the Wonk, aborted it, reinitiated it, aborted it once again. He formulated words, but they never got as far as his voice box. He had the powerful sense of God waiting at his shoulder with a less than divine quota of patience.
He turned. On almost soundless plastic feet, he left.
There’s an almost Monty Python-esque silliness to it all, and if you are familiar with these legendary masters of the absurdist and the irrational, you will realise that every single one of their skits made some sort of damning point about how bizarrely wrong we can often be.
Which is fine if it’s just the human race on the chopping block but in Service Model, it’s a legion of robotic beings like Charles who, with some persistent urging from a mysterious figure only known as The Wonk, are being forced to work out what life, artificial though it may be, is like when there’s no one around to issue the orders that keep the whole digital show on the road.
Part self-realisational journey, part treatise on whether you can fix what is already inherently and comprehensively broken, Service Model is an emotional satisfying, intellectually alive delight of a novel that asks some very big questions, has a lot of Douglas Adams-ish fun answering them (many of the turns of phrase are a wondrously amusing joy) and ends up on the cusp of something possible and good if only Charles can trascend his programming and realising that maybe the world can be saved and he can be the one to do it.