Hugo Novel Ballot Review: Service Model, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Hugo Novel Ballot Review: Service Model, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

a review by Rich Horton

This is the sixth and last of my reviews of novels on the 2025 Hugo Award final ballot. Service Model is one of two Adrian Tchaikovsky novels that made the ballot this year. It's a standalone novel (as was the other, Alien Clay.) 

The novel opens with Charles, a robot valet, going through his normal routine serving his master. We quickly gather that things aren't quite normal -- though Charles always asks, his master doesn't need much of what he offers. He never travels, so Charles can't make travel plans or ask as chauffeur. He doesn't have a wife any more, and in general he's not interested in much of anything. But today things are even more different -- for when Charles goes to dress his master, he finds him inert, and there's a terrible red stain. It's quickly clear that Charles must have slashed his master's throat while shaving him, though Charles has no record of taking such an action in his memory.

Charles must be defective, he concludes, so he heads off to the diagnostic center to be repaired. But once there is it clear that not much is being accomplished -- in fact, all the robots are sent to "data compression", which turns about to be rather more literal than one might hope. But Charles has encountered another very unusual robot called "The Wonk", which insists that Charles must have been infected with the "protagonist virus", which gives him free will. Charles doesn't believe this, and decides that the Wonk is a terribly defective robot. (The reader will instantly recognize what the Wonk really is.) Charles desperately want to return to service, and the Wonk, having given him a new name -- Uncharles, as he can hardly still use the name his mater had given him -- suggests he investigate a "Conservation Farm" where humans are attempting to reenact ancient human life -- prior to robots.

So begins Uncharles' journeys through a world which is revealed as post-Apocalyptic -- society has clearly completely collapsed. The "farm" turns out to be a horribly oppressive sort of prison, where "volunteers" are compelled to pointlessly take a subway to work and to meaningless work etc. etc. The Wonk invades the farm -- she (she is mysteriously given a pronoun at some point) is very good at getting into places -- and helps free Uncharles from service to the bureaucrat running the farm. Then there is a journey to the "central library", where robots are archiving all human knowledge; then an encounter with "God" who gives Uncharles three wishes -- sending him first to serve the master of a manor like his first manor -- but of course there is no living human there; then a feral group of humans, who have no particular use for Uncharles, then a "king" -- but not a human king but a massive robotic soldier, ruling a group of military robots fighting an endless war. Finally, he and the Wonk (who keeps showing up) journey to God to finally learn the real truth as to what caused the apocalypse -- and they learn of course that God is no better than anyone else in this terrible future.

I am of two minds about this novel. It's very cleverly written, in Tchaikovsky's snarky voice, which is well adapted to the satirical aims of the book. Both Uncharles and the Wonk are delightful characters, though most of the rest of the characters (almost all robots) are slimly depicted. I found myself quite moved at times. Still, some of the book is too obviously set up to make satirical points that don't always land; some of it is unconvincing (particularly the time span), and every so often Tchaikovsky stomps on a joke (as when I could see the setup for an Oz reference towards the end of the book from a mile away.) It's a bit tendentious, for sure. All that said, on the whole it works nicely, and I enjoyed reading it.

Bottom line -- I divide the Hugo nominees this year into three piles -- one novel is to my mind clearly at the top; four novels are pretty close to each other in the middle group -- and Service Model is in this pile; and one novel is distinctly the least of the nominees (to my mind, a really puzzling choice.) I'll do an official summary at my Substack in a few days. 

Review: Collisions, by Alec Nevala-Lee

Review: Collisions, by Alec Nevala-Lee

a review by Rich Horton

Alec Nevala-Lee is building a repuation as one of the best biographers of science, with his previous books Astounding (about a science fiction magazine and four major contributors, of whom one was a scientist (in a minor way), one a pseudo-scientists (among many "pseudo" identities, and the other two technincally trained and very interested in science (and pseudoscience!) and Buckminster Fuller: Inventor of the Future; and now with this book, a biography of the Nobel Prize winning physicist Luis Alvarez. (And he is currently working on a book about the scientifically-focussed think tank the RAND Corporation.)

His books have all taken a truly scientific approach to their subjects, by which I mean not just thorough research but a degree of skepticism. This continues in Collisions. Luis Alvarez was a remarkable scientist who made a number of profound contributions to both his field and other fields. But he was also sometimes difficult to work with (although to my mind the book shows that difficult as he could be, he was working with people just as difficult,) and he was by no means above slanting his conclusions to favor his preferred viewpoint -- never to the point of anything like fraud, mind you, just a very human tendency to emphasize the positive. That said, when he was proved wrong, he admitted it, and indeed celebrated it -- a fundamental characteristic of good science is recognizing that learning that a hypothesis, or even an estabilished belief, is wrong counts as progress in the search for knowledge.

Alvarez's major contributions are many indeed, and this book covers them well. Nevala-Lee has the ability to describe the scientific advancements, and their significance, quite clearly to a lay audience. (Calibrate that if you must against the fact that I have a B. S. in Physics.) He does so economically as well. Alvarez was at heart an experimentalist as opposed to a theoritician, and so some of his contributions were in the area of inventing better instruments, or designing clever experiments, to get data that would help the theory folks prove or disprove their ideas, or give them evidence that might prompt additional theorizing. In this area he invented the "bubble chamber", a key enhancement to the cloud chamber, for tracking subatomic particle paths. (He eventually won the Nobel Prize in part for this innovation.) He devised a source of "slow neutrons". As a student he helped set up an experiment that determined the charge of cosmic rays. He also found practical nonscientific uses for some of the equipment he worked with, perhaps most dramatically in inventing a way to use radar to help land airplanes in bad weather. He did make some important physical discoveries as well, such as proving the Helium-3 was stable and present in nature, but tritium was radioactive. (I have left stuff out, of course.)

His reputation in the wider world, to be sure, derives from other contributions, such as his work on the Manhattan project. (Which led to controversy when he testified against Robert Oppenheimer when the question of Oppenheimer's clearance came up in the 1950s.) He spent a fair amount of energy refuting conspiracies about the Kennedy assassination. And most dramatically, he, along with his son Walter, Helen Michael, and Frank Asaro (whose daughter Catherine is a prominent science fiction writer), discovered the evidence (excess iridium in the very thin layer of clay in rocks from around the boundary at the end of the Cretaceous Era) that indicated that the Cretaceous extinction event was caused by an asteroid strike.

Nevala-Lee tells all these stories engagingly. He is careful to credit all of Alvarez's many collaborators -- which Alvarez always did as well. He also tells of Alvarez' occasional failures. He is very open about his shortcomings -- a tendency to be very hard on some of his colleagues, and at times to be vicious to scientists whom he felt had betrayed science, usually by opposing Alvarez' ideas in a case where Alvarez would eventually be proven right. This book is much more about Alvarez the scientist than Alvarez the man, though undoubtedly that's in part because the man was above all a scientist, sometimes to the detriment of his personal life. But we do learn about his childhood, and about his father, a prominent doctor, and about his two wives. (His first marriage collapsed largely due to the time Alvarez spent away from his wife doing his job (and to be fair, the worst of this was during the War, and its hard to blame Alvarez for that investment of time), but his second marriage seems to have been much more successful -- and Alvarez acknowledged that this was in part because he let his wife be much more involved with his work. Both his wives were very intelligent women as far as I can tell, and one minor subthread of this book subtly indicates the way in which women were kept away from pursuing scientific careers at that time.)

This is another excellent scientifically-oriented biography from Alec Nevala-Lee. As his career continues, I suspect Nevala-Lee will have given us a broad portrait of scientific advances, scientific problems, and pseudo-scientific errors in the 20th Century, and I'm looking forward to reading about all these.

Review: Some Trick, by Helen DeWitt

Review: Some Trick, by Helen DeWitt

a review by Rich Horton

Some Trick is a collection of thirteen short stories (and one prefatory poem) by Helen DeWitt, who is best known for her brilliant 2000 novel The Last Samurai. On reading The Last Samurai I immediately realized I should read anything else she's published. I have since read her sly novelette The English Understand Wool, and now this book. There is another novel, Lightning Rods (2011), and a third upcoming later this year, Your Name Here, written with Ilya Gridneff. The books published to date are all available from the venerable small press New Directions (though The Last Samurai first appeared from another publisher, who seems to have been very difficult for DeWitt to work with (partly due to corporate mergers.)) The new novel will be published by another outstanding small press, one of my favorites: The Dalkey Archive. (DeWitt's difficulties with publishers seems to inform some of the plot of The English Understand Wool, and also might inform bits and pieces of the stories in Some Trick.)

The stories in Some Trick cover a wide variety of subjects, mostly touching in some way on the arts. The voice is varied as needed throughout but is always recognizable as DeWitt's. I'm not sure of the provenance of most of them -- one, "Climbers", appeared in Harper's in 2014, and three are dated "Oxford 1985" so presumably date to her time at Oxford, where she got her doctorate. (I will say that I find the habit of literary publishers refraining from giving original places of publication for stories in collections quite annoying.) The collection itself appeared in 2018.

On the whole the book is a delight. If there is any flaw -- and this is less of a flaw than an ambiguous virtue -- it is that in the weaker pieces a sense of cleverness (and DeWitt is very clever indeed) may be the main thing a reader takes away. But the best pieces are thought provoking, intensely enjoyable, sometimes very funny indeed, and sometimes quite powerful. The arts dealt with are varied too -- visual arts, books, music, even math. (Which, really, also describes The Last Samurai.)

As to the stories, very briefly: "Brutto" concerns an artist who finds herself approached by a crazy Italian man who wants her to make a number of copies of a suit she had made as a youthful apprentice as a dressmaker, and exhibit them as works of art. And for financial reasons, and artistic ambitions, she can't resist. It'a almost a satire of the art scene, but stays just short of that, and I liked it a lot. "My Heart Belongs to Bertie" is a rather astonishing little piece about a mathematician, and statistics, and publishing, and computer programming -- this is the sort of thing only DeWitt, it seems to me, could pull off. "On the Town" is about a young man from Iowa who ends up rooming in New York with the disaffected son of a wildly successful writer of children's books, and -- well, it's hard to describe but it's a madcap ride through some wild financial maneuvers and a guy from the sticks falling in love with New York and, well, it's very funny. "Remember Me" mixes a famous Jewish writer, a Church of England canon who wants a Jewish man to participate in VE Day services, and a young woman friend of the writer's fiancee who is writing a novel herself. This one didn't fully work for me. "Climbers" is also about a famous writer, and a couple of people who are sort of obsessive fans of him in different ways, and a project to try to get the writer's latest book published in the US -- which tells you nothing about the story, which is more about some offbeat characters, and about publishing -- and I thought it absorbing. 

"The French Style of Mlle Matsumoto" switches from publishing to music -- a brief story of a famous French pianist, and a Japanese woman who was herself an exceptional Chopin interpreter -- an about the Second World War and antisemitism and eventually about, perhaps, musical influence passing down generations. But nothing so banal. "Stolen Luck" is also about music -- about a rock band and their drummer and a photographer and an unexpected hit song and -- it's amusing but minor in among DeWitt's work. Back to rock music for "In Which Nick Buys a Harley for 16K Having Once Been Young" -- in this case a band in 1970 making a US tour and falling apart due to, I suppose, creative differences, or a slimy producer. "Plantinga" is back to visual art -- the title character is a photographer, and this short story quickly covers her life and a few of her works -- there's no describing it really, but it works. (Maybe the Lem and Calvino references make it work for me!) And finally "Entourage" is one of my favorites, about a man trying to collect books with different letters in them -- so from different languages with different orthographies -- and it goes on to a project to hire associated to carry his suitcases full of books -- and then somehow to the founding of a restaurant change. And to a bunch of guys named Josh. And a Lem reference again -- well, kind of the same Lem reference. The story is bonkers but great weird fun.

I said "finally" but I skipped the three Oxford stories. To me they have a slight different feel, and the cleverness is definitely front and center. They are all still solid work, if sometimes seeming a bit unfinished. (But I suspect entire finished in DeWitt's mind.) "Improvisation is the Heart of Music" features Edward and Maria, who as we meet them are newlyweds embarking on a honeymoon -- an old-fashioned honeymoon through Europe by boat-train. And Edward tells stories, which Maria has heard before. And which pretty openly are derived from The Count of Monte Cristo. "Famous Last Words" is conversations and seduction -- with mentions of structuralism and advanced math, and characters named X and x, and -- it's very clever, and sexy in its way. In "Trevor" Lily and Trevor talk about art, and about beauty, and prettiness, and Botticelli and a possible Gainsborough, and perspective. It has a certain mystery to it -- perhaps the most successful of these three stories. Though, really, even if I imply they are not finished -- maybe I am wrong, as I certainly was intrigued by all of them.

I haven't, I think, done a good job saying what these stories are really like, and probably with a writer like DeWitt you simply have to follow her. The words are important, the rhythm, the ideas -- and a way of balancing ever present irony with the certainty that serious matters (in most cases) are being treated. It's fascinating work, and even the lesser stories compel reading. 

Review: Miss Mackenzie, by Anthony Trollope

Review: Miss Mackenzie, by Anthony Trollope

by Rich Horton

I continue my reading of the immensely enjoyable mid-Victorian writer Anthony Trollope. I have so far mostly concentrated on his two most famous sequences of novels: the Barsetshire Chronicles and the Palliser (or Parliamentarian) books -- to date I've read the first four Barsetshire books, and the first two Palliser books. The only other Trollope novel I have read is one of his very last, The Fixed Period, a minor work that I read only because it is science fiction. I figured perhaps it was time to read one of his other non-series books, but one more in his main line. I have two on hand: The Claverings and Miss Mackenzie, and I chose the latter.

Miss Mackenzie was published in 1865. Trollope wrote it right after The Small House at Allington (1864) (second to last of the Barsetshire books) and Can You Forgiver Her? (1864-1865) (first of the Palliser novels.) As with many of his contemporary-set novels, it shares characters with his other books -- in particular, in this book we see the lawyer Mr. Slow, of the firm Slow and Bideawhile, who shows up in Doctor Thorne and several other novels; as well as Lady Glencora Palliser, who is a major character in the Palliser books and also appears briefly in The Small House at Allington, and even Griselda Grantly, an important character in Framley Parsonage who also shows up in several other novels. (It's interesting that the Lady Glencora we see in Miss Mackenzie is much more like the powerful society woman of Phineas Finn (and presumbably later Palliser novels) than the rather uncertain of herself character in Can You Forgive Her?, though to be sure events in that novel make it clear by the end that she is finding her footing.)

Trollope stated that he wanted to write a book without a "love" plot, and in so doing he chose for his main character an "unattractive old maid". But as even he noted, he couldn't help himself, and Miss Mackenzie does indeed find love. Also, any attentive reader will note that Miss Mackenzie is actually quite attractive, though her initial poverty and long years spent nursing her ailing brother might have disguised that, and also will note that while she was an "old maid" by Victorian standards, she is only in her mid-30s at the time of action of the book.

The novel opens with the death of her sickly brother Walter, and the revelation that Miss Margaret Mackenzie has inherited a modest fortune -- worth about £800 a year. This was completely unexpected. She resolves to live independently in the town of Littlebath (a spa town clearly modeled on Bath), taking her niece Susanna with her and providing for her education. She is quickly importuned with marriage proposals from her one time lover* Harry Handcock, and her cousin John Ball. She rejects both, in part as the proposals seem motivated by a desire to have her money, not any feeling of love. In John Ball's case, while she rather likes him, she is very conscious that the Ball side of the family had never got along with the Mackenzie side, in part because the very money Walter had passed on to Margaret was given him by John's uncle Jonathan. John resents this very much, and his rather nasty parents even more. Likewise, her other brother Tom (Susanna's father) and his wife feel that they deserved the money -- though Tom had used his half of Jonathan Ball's inheritance to invest in a now failing business, Rubb and Mackenzie. 

Once in Littlebath, Miss Mackenzie establishes herself in a nice place, and contemplates with to become part of the "church" set, a group of ladies who attend the services of an evangelical minister named Mr. Stumfold; or the more social set, led by her neighbour Miss Todd. At the same time she finds herself importuned by Tom Mackenzie's partner, Mr. Rubb, who wants her to lend their firm £2500. And then Mr. Rubb, who is good looking and youngish (about Miss Mackenzie's age) begins to court her. But his vulgarity stands against him -- and also, we quickly learn, his dishonesty. Mr. Stumfold's curate, Mr. Maguire, also sets his ery on Miss Mackenzie. This "unattractive old maid" has quickly received four marriage proposals!

All this less than half way into the novel. Miss Mackenzie is tempted by some of the offers, but between a feeling that all of her suitors love her money more than they love her; and a feeling that she want to be romanced, and wants to truly love her husband; she rejects them all. And things get complicated -- her brother Tom suddenly dies; and a question arises about her inheritance -- was the will that gave Walter and Tom Jonathan Ball's money really valid? So Margaret must navigate a good deal of misfortune with nothing but her steady honesty and virtue on her side. 

This description possibly doesn't sound very promising, but it misses what the novel is really like. For one thing, it is essentially a comic novel, and it shines with a number of comic scenes -- some of them really just set pieces (as with the bazaar for the benefit of "Negro soldiers' orphans" (the Civil War was ongoing as Trollope wrote, and there was interest in providing for the children of freed slaves whose fathers had died fighting for the Union)) and as with an unfortunate dinner party Mrs. Tom Mackenzie attempts to put on. Others are part and parcel of the plot -- the vicious behaviour of Lady Ball, the hypocritical attitudes of Mr. Stumfold and his flock, Miss Mackenzie's landlady and her cigar-smoking husband-to-be; and the satire aimed at the "Christian" newspaper to which Mr. Maguire contributes libelous articles. Miss Mackenzie is an admirable character for who we root, and her suitors are a much weaker lot but either humorously unfit, or realistically weak but plausible. 

I don't think the novel ranks among Trollope's best works -- it's better than The Fixed Period but I have to say I've preferred the Barsetshire and Palliser novels I've read so far. But Trollope is always -- at least so far! -- entertaining, and this book is worth reading. I read it in Oxford World Classics edition from 1988, with a pretty good introduction by A. O. J. Cockshut (whose last name, alas, could almost have been a Trollopian coinage!) The novel doesn't seem to have been well-received on the whole, and it wasn't reprinted for almost 60 years after the first two editions appeared in 1865 and 1866. 

Resurrected Review: The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri

Resurrected Review: The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri

by Rich Horton

This is a review of Jhumpa Lahiri's first novel, that I wrote back in 2006 or so. I should add that my potted bio below is obviously out of date. Lahiri has published more novels and stories since then, and, most notably, has lived in Italy since 2012, and has been writing it Italian, including a novel, Dove mi trovo (2018) (published in English as Whereabouts.) I haven't really kept up with her writing, except for the occasional story in the New Yorker, though I will say I quite enjoyed the most recent such story I saw.

So -- what I wrote in 2006 follows:

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in England, to Indian parents, and grew up in Rhode Island. So it is perhaps not surprising that her subject, so far, seems to be the problems of Indian immigrants in assimilating. (Or that one of the main characters in her first novel, The Namesake, is a woman born in England to Indian parents who grew up in Massachusetts and New Jersey.) This is a fertile subject area for interesting fiction -- but I have to say, I'm thinking maybe she should branch out a bit. [And I should add that she definitely has "branched out" since then!]

Her first book, the story collection Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize. I first encountered her work with a story called "Gogol", in the New Yorker. I found it wonderful -- the best story published in the New Yorker that year. I soon learned that "Gogol" was an excerpt from a novel, her first, The Namesake, which was published in 2003 to considerable acclaim.

I have finally got around to reading the novel. And I have to say that it mostly lives up to my impression based on the short story -- but not quite fully. I suspect the problem -- a mild one -- is that Lahiri has not quite learned to structure a novel. The Namesake is somewhat episodic, and I don't think it is fully successful as a "novel" -- but as a reading experience it is ultimately quite satisfying.

It is in the main the story of the life (through early adulthood) of Gogol Ganguli, who is born in 1968 in Boston, to Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli. Ashoke is a Ph.D. student in Electrical Engineering at MIT. He and Ashima are Bengalis from Calcutta, and their marriage was arranged in traditional fashion. They have been in the US only a year or so when their child is born. His unusual first name is intended to be a nickname -- taken from Ashoke's favorite author. His grandmother is expected to suggest his real name, but her letter gets lost between India and the US, and they are forced to put Gogol on their boy's birth certificate.

The novel then takes several jumps to describe Gogol's life: his childhood, spent mostly in the US, with occasional long trips to India; his college career, at Yale and Columbia, where he becomes an architect; several love affairs -- in college with an American girl, then a strange sort of affair, including living together, with a very privileged American; then an affair with a married woman; and finally a semi-arranged relationship followed by marriage to another Indian -- a girl he had met as a child. Gogol -- who eventually does take a "real" name, Nikhil (related of course to Nikolai Gogol's first name) -- is a fully realized character, and very much an American born in the US with an identity split between his Indian heritage and his American life.

I liked it quite a bit, with as I have said some reservations about the overall structure. I also felt at times that some of the middle of the book, in particular, was a bit pat -- convenient -- things seemed to happen in Gogol's life to help the author make a point at times. But the ending is well done, and quite moving. Gogol himself is a wonderfully realized character, as are a couple others -- his mother, Ashima, for example, and also his eventual wife. Some of the other characters are a bit thin, not wholly convincing. The prose is excellent -- Lahiri is a very fine writer qua writer. And the general theme is well conveyed -- the conflicted desire, as I see it, of someone like Gogol to be fully American (as he surely is) but not to lose his heritage (a desire sometimes expressed more as rebellion tinged with guilt). And this is nicely contrasted with Ashima's situation -- she is really reluctant to move from India, and misses her home her whole life -- then by the end she is herself, we realize, as American as she is Indian.