Murderbot meets Redshirts in a delightfully humorous tale of robotic murder from the Hugo-nominated author of Elder Race and Children of Time.
To fix the world they must first break it, further.
Humanity is a dying breed, utterly reliant on artificial labor and service.
When a domesticated robot gets a nasty little idea downloaded into its core programming, they murder their owner. The robot discovers they can also do something else they never did before: They can run away.
Fleeing the household they enter a wider world they never knew existed, where the age-old hierarchy of humans at the top is disintegrating into ruins and an entire robot ecosystem devoted to human wellbeing is having to find a new purpose.
Sometimes all it takes is a nudge to overcome the limits of your programming.
An interesting take on the "robot apocalypse."
As someone who's read a lot of speculative fiction, many of the concepts and themes at play in "Service Model" were more than a little familiar to me. Thus, the things that made it an intriguing and worthwhile read are those it does differently from the many tales warning of humanity's potential downfall I've previously encountered, which I won't spoil here. Fortunately, there was just enough of that to keep me interested and turning pages despite feeling on several occasions throughout the read that the book was a bit longer and more plodding than would have been ideal. Still, I'd concede that readers less accustomed to such tales might find the story's length and attention to detail more desirable and satisfying than I did. Additionally, the quality of the writing went a long way toward making any familiar or subjectively drawn-out aspects decidedly more palatable than they otherwise would have been.
All things considered, I enjoyed "Service Model" and would generally recommend it to fans of speculative fiction as I believe it has a lot to offer various types of readers possessing different levels of experience with the genre.