I don't know where the events of 'Service Model' take place, though they're clearly on the planet Earth, and I don't know when, but this is clearly a very British science fiction novel. It's humorous, but with a thoroughly polite and ruthlessly black humour that runs through English comedy from Oscar Wilde through 'Kind Hearts and Coronets' to Tom Sharpe, not to miss the clearest influence on show, which is Douglas Adams.

In fact, this often reads like a very focused and dedicated Douglas Adams, ironically so given that it's as rambling and episodic as any incarnation of 'The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy'. It would not shock me to discover that the impetus for the entire book was the scene in 'Mostly Harmless' about a Grebulon reconnaissance ship attempting to figure out what's wrong with it. That scene is conversational but there aren't any human beings involved; the talk is between sensors, programs and agents, and the robots they collectively send out to investigate.

This book follows suit with almost every character a robot and almost every conversation robotic. The second human to speak doesn't do so until page 142 and the first is disguised as a robot, even if the focal character, another robot, doesn't realise that fact until the finalé. We do, immediately; though my initial assumption that he was rather akin to Brad Pitt's character in 'Twelve Monkeys' was skewered a little when I realised she was female. After all, she goes by the Wonk and that's a gender-neutral name.

That focal character is initially named Charles, a gentleman's gentlerobot, or a high class valet to the rich and powerful. However, he loses that name when he leaves the manor which has been his only home, because it belongs to the household. He has to leave because he's committed a murder, which surprised him as much as anyone else. It seems that, while shaving his master, a thoroughly routine task, he slit his throat and carries on regardless, not having a clue that he'd committed a murder or indeed that a murder had been committed. When he realises it, he decides to present himself to a diagnostician at Central Services to figure out what's wrong with him.

There's a lot more than that going on in the first four chapters, before we meet the Wonk, and it's a great way to decide whether you're going to love this book or hurl it aside. When Charles starts to notice the many inefficiencies in the household, like the fact that he lays out his master's travel clothes every single day as one task and puts them away again as another, even though his master hasn't travelled in years and isn't likely to any more now that he's dead, we start to question how robotic he is. These are surely the sparks of self-determination and that's a central theme for the book. However, we also notice the inefficiencies and see the parallels.

These four chapters are a great lesson for computer programmers. Always be explicit, all-inclusive and, of course, accurate, with all your instructions. Programs, like robots in this book, only do what they're told to do. Tell them to do something contradictory or without sufficient data and it won't do what you want it to. And that's fine with a development instance running in a test environment but this book applies it to all crucial infrastructure not only running in production but running our entire world. When that goes wrong, everything goes wrong. There are parallels here to 'Magnus Robot Fighter 4000 A.D.', which I also reviewed this month, entirely coincidentally.

The longer this runs, the more we realise the Kafka-esque idiocy and epochal waste that we tend to associate with blind bureaucracy pervades everything. However, it's not human driven, like 'The Trial' or a derivative like Terry Gilliam's 'Brazil'. It's programmatic, so we remember struggles we have trying to navigate automated phone system menus. The logic loops are hilarious, leading to glorious error messages like "Further details of our service may be found at error 404 address not found. Your business is important to us." Note: you can see my mention of Kafka as a hint as to the meaning of the apparently cryptic headings to the various parts of the book.

Eventually, I remembered meetings I've had in corporate America during which I've argued with a colleague for half an hour about something, only to discover that we were in agreement all along but were each working to different definitions of important words like "deletion", "privileged" or "permissions", so it didn't remotely seem that way at the time. Thus the lesson for programmers applies just as well to documenters and program managers. If we can't agree on the meaning of a word, which definition should a robot assume when it's used in a command?

'Service Model' is this sort of book, but framed as a post-apocalyptic voyage of discovery. Charles only wants to serve because he's a valet and that's what he's programmed to do, but he can't find anyone to serve, so he starts to question his existence. The Wonk's constant suggestions that he's been infected with the Protagonist Virus and has thus become self-aware continually chips away at his belief that he's been given a purpose and that's the end of it. In a way, that's the backdrop for the adventures that take them into a succession of wildly different environments, rather than the other way around.

Of course, Adrian Tchaikovsky's masterful choice to tell this story almost entirely through the eyes of robots, the Wonk the only human being to get more than a moment in the spotlight, is a way for him to sucker us into a key realisation. Initially, we see this as about robots, because they're all we see for the longest time. We don't talk like that. We don't act like that. We don't think like that. I expect that all readers will come to the same realisation in the end, but some sooner than others, that it's really all about us. Humans programmed these robots to act like them, so they do. When we meet diagnosticians and librarians and soldiers, they serve as a way to see ourselves through a different lens, one that's pessimistic for sure but not as depressing as you might think.

I had an absolute blast with this book. Sure, I work in IT and much of my job is risk management, so I'm very aware of how easily things can go horribly wrong and how complex it can be to avoid that. Reading that explored in science fiction with this level of cynicism, brutal irony and black humour is a real treat for me, even before I mention the easter eggs. There are plenty of references to be caught, not only in those part headings but in offhand comments here and there. I caught quite a few but I'm sure I missed some too. I can see coming back to this one in a few years to see if I catch any more.

Now where's that flush underground manor located with its full staff of twenty-three robots who clearly need a new master, given that the old one never made it? After all, I should give them all a purpose, right? I think I can do that. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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