Service Model
By Adrian Tchaikovsky
Tor Publishing Group
The world’s a disaster. A war zone, to be exact. And humanity, well, let’s just say that humanity doesn’t have a lot going for it at the moment. So when a service robot’s code base goes haywire, it murders its owner (quite logically, to be sure) and embarks upon an odyssey to find itself a new, more useful owner. What results is an adventure as seen through the computed brain of the service robot and the robots (or maybe non-robots) it encounters and attempts to protect while hoping to find meaning in its own existence. A little bit tongue in cheek, a lot Armageddon, with a bit of philosophy thrown in. I’m not huge on this kind of speculative fiction, but if you are then it’s worth the read.