2025 Hugo Finalists: Service Model

This post is part of the series, Reading the 2025 Hugo Finalists for Best Novel, where I am reading through all the 2025 Hugo Award Finalists for best novel. These are not book reviews. Just some scant thoughts as I think through a voting order.

Reading Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky was neither good nor bad. It was just something I did. I was excited going in to this one given some favorable reviews comparing the writing to John Scalzi and Martha Wells (for Murderbot). The first few chapters dealing with Charles's crime, the doctor's visit, and the investigation of the detective was silly and downright hilarious at parts. From there the novel felt repetitive and tedious as Uncharles traveled along with "the Wonk" and learned about the post-apocalyptic state of the world.

My mental image through most of the novel used characters straight out of Futurama. In my teens and twenties I was a huge fan of Futurama and a lot of the situations and scenarios Unchales and the Wonk encounter would have fit perfectly in to any season. From silly logical quips to obsessions with efficiency, the ridiculousness of bureaucracy, and the non-perfect functioning of systems that are meant to make human lives easier Service Model pokes fun at many of the same things that Futurama did. In this respect, Service Model was hindered by a much smaller "main cast" in Uncharles and the Wonk. Other characters came and went, but none stuck around or made much of impression (except perhaps the short-lived Inspector Birdbot and Doctor Namehere) as the giant cast of Futurama.

After that, the farm, library, wasteland, and courthouse were more serious, less silly, and not well enough developed to really get in to. The dark humor lost a lot of it's edge as things got more serious along the way and none of the other secondary characters stood out as much. I also could never quite place how I felt about Uncharles being unable to recognize that the Wonk was human. This led to a lot of amusing little anecdotes and did build up nicely in the end, but it was clear enough to the reader very early on that the revelation felt somewhat hollow and uninteresting when it (finally) happened.