Service Model, a Novel About an Unromantic Robot

@Joe pointed me to this hilarious and occasionally poignant novel when I was looking for sci-fi/fantasy books for my two teenagers to read, and I ended up reading it myself as well, and loving it. It’s a kind of picaresque about a robot valet seeking new employment (and the less you know about the rest of the plot, the better), which author Adrian Tchaikovsky has said was particularly inspired by a scene from Douglas Adams’s The Restaurant at the End of the Universe:

“Zaphod, on a devastated world of ruins, finds an intact space liner filled with people who are being kept in suspension until the ship receives a shipment of lemon-scented paper napkins. Zaphod points out that civilization outside has ended, and the ship placidly suggests that eventually a new culture will arise that will invent lemon-scented paper napkins, and then they can take off. It’s that kind of utterly logical and utterly insane machine viewpoint that gave rise to Service Model.”

As far as I can tell from poking around in his other work, Tchaikovsky doesn’t normally write comedy, but this is a very funny book.