Shawn
A brilliant concept executed with real wit and invention, but one that kept me at arm’s length from start to finish.
The premise is immediately compelling: Charles, a robot valet, accidentally murders his master during the morning shave, and then — having no protocol for this — tries to complete the rest of his task queue anyway. He dresses the corpse, serves it dinner, attempts a seaside drive. It’s darkly funny and philosophically sharp, and Tchaikovsky uses it to launch a sprawling meditation on purpose, identity, consciousness, and the collapse of civilization.
The world-building is genuinely impressive. The journey from the manor to Central Services to an underground human farm to a mountain library to a robot army to God’s courthouse is inventive at every turn, and the satirical targets — bureaucratic paralysis, institutional decay, the violence of “probably guilty” justice — land with real precision. The Library sequence in particular is one of the cleverest things I’ve read this year.
My problem is the central one the book sets up for itself: when your entire cast explicitly cannot feel anything, it’s hard to care about them. I admired Uncharles. I respected the Wonk’s grief. But I never quite felt either of them. The novel asks you to root for characters who keep insisting there’s nothing to root for, and while that’s intellectually interesting, it made for an emotionally exhausting read.
If you love ideas-driven SF and don’t need warm characters to stay engaged, this is absolutely your book. For me, it was one I respected more than I loved.
A brilliant concept executed with real wit and invention, but one that kept me at arm’s length from start to finish.
The premise is immediately compelling: Charles, a robot valet, accidentally murders his master during the morning shave, and then — having no protocol for this — tries to complete the rest of his task queue anyway. He dresses the corpse, serves it dinner, attempts a seaside drive. It’s darkly funny and philosophically sharp, and Tchaikovsky uses it to launch a sprawling meditation on purpose, identity, consciousness, and the collapse of civilization.
The world-building is genuinely impressive. The journey from the manor to Central Services to an underground human farm to a mountain library to a robot army to God’s courthouse is inventive at every turn, and the satirical targets — bureaucratic paralysis, institutional decay, the violence of “probably guilty” justice — land with real precision. The Library sequence in particular is one of the cleverest things I’ve read this year.
My problem is the central one the book sets up for itself: when your entire cast explicitly cannot feel anything, it’s hard to care about them. I admired Uncharles. I respected the Wonk’s grief. But I never quite felt either of them. The novel asks you to root for characters who keep insisting there’s nothing to root for, and while that’s intellectually interesting, it made for an emotionally exhausting read.
If you love ideas-driven SF and don’t need warm characters to stay engaged, this is absolutely your book. For me, it was one I respected more than I loved.