Adrian Tchaikovsky is, in my opinion, one of the best science fiction writers out there today. His latest provides further confirmation of my opinion of the man and his works.
The protagonist here is a robotic valet, living and working on the estate of his human master with a few dozen other robot servants. He discovers one day that his master is dead - oddly, on reviewing his logs, the valet himself slit his throat during his morning shave. Strange, in that there’s no decision tree leading to the action, but regardless his tasks are clear and must be completed.
After a period of some Weekend at Bernie’s kind of shenanigans - the master’s orders didn’t include any contingency like “don’t bother if I’m dead,” so he still needs to be dressed, his food prepared, etc - the valet and other robot services conclude that the (robotic) doctor must be called in, and the (robotic) police must be informed that the valet has murdered their master. The valet is eventually sent off to Diagnostics to figure out what went wrong with him and from there, hopefully, to another master who won’t object to his negligible, but admittedly non-zero, history of murder.
Unfortunately the world has fallen apart. The manors adjacent to his master’s are all in various stages of abandonment and decay. There’s precious little sign of humans, and the robots that the valet encounters are mostly stuck in loops, following orders no longer valid but without any authority to do anything else.
This book is both incredibly bleak and incredibly funny - though you would need a particular taste for black humor to find it so. It’s a not-terribly-subtle critique of late stage capitalism, basically. It reminded me of Firewalkers, another book of Tchaikovsky’s (though of course late stage capitalism and climate change are closely connected).
The promise of increased automation has always been increased leisure time, which hasn’t happened as much as it should for numerous reasons. We often hear about people whose jobs are being left behind by a society that no longer needs them. In American politics, coal miners are often brought up, but there’s many more. Service Model speaks to this kind of problem, but on a more fundamental level. We, as a society, define one’s worth to society based on one’s productivity. It’s not something we really ever admit, but it underpins everything. What happens if and when automation progresses to the point where there’s not enough productivity to go around? Will we figure out a way to redefine how we value individuals as a society, or will the haves simply pull the ladder up behind themselves, congratulate themselves on their success and their virtue (each one being axiomatic proof of the other), and tell the have-nots to pull themselves up by the bootstraps?
I think we all know which one is more likely. Tchaikovsky agrees. Hence the “bleak” I mentioned above.
Despite the bleakness, it does end on a hopeful note. And I was laughing, sometimes to tears, the entire time I was reading this. Tchaikovsky is a genius.
Comments