I’ve read a number of books in the past year that used the narrative device of telling the stories from the point of view of a machine intelligence (two were robots, the other an AI). A few stood out.
Keeping readers engaged when your narrator is a machine sounds like a hard trick to pull off. All three authors managed it.
The first was Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model (2024), which is a satirical sci-fi novel that tells the story of a valet robot who finds he’s murdered his master with a shaving razor, but can’t remember the event. The robot, Charles, finds himself without a master, and therefore unable to do the menial tasks he’s designed for. He heads out into the world and finds that human society has almost completely fallen apart, which is a little challenging to all the robots in the world who derive their meaning from doing work for them.
The world-building in this book is kind of nuts. Robots everywhere. Systems falling apart because the humans are no longer in the loop. Machines that talk to each other, but with different levels of smartness and dedication.
I’m not the only one who liked it—the book was shortlisted for an Arthur C. Clarke Award and was a finalist for both the Hugo and Locus in 2025. If memory serves, I heard about it on an episode of The Incomparable podcast (recommended, if you like to listen to nerds talking about culture). Do you like a quirky sci-fi story with humour? Then give this one a try.
The second book was Mal Goes to War by Edward Ashton (2024). Ashton also wrote Mickey7, which was turned into the movie Mickey 17 directed by Bong Joon-ho.
The Mal (short for Malware) in the book is a free AI who gets sucked into the middle of a conflict between the Federals, who are augmented humans, and the Humanists, who are more puritanical and anti-augmentation. Mal really has no interest in either side, but when his access to Infospace (the book’s equivalent of the Internet) is cut off, he finds himself trapped in the body of cyborg mercenary whose job was protecting a modded girl named Kayleigh who looks like a toddler, talks like a teen, and fights like a ninja. Stuck in a decaying cyborg and unable to escape back to Infospace, Mal commits to taking on Kayleigh’s protection, and things escalate from there.
This book ticks a lot of my boxes. Humorous, quippy banter. Near-future story. Technology. Characters you like and want to root for. Tick, tick, tick. If that’s your bag also, give Mal Goes to War a shot.
The third book was a very gentle novella called Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz about a bunch of deactivated robots who wake up in their abandoned ghost kitchen and decide that the thing to do is open a noodle shop. It’s a sweet, very humanist story that, to me, gave off very Becky Chambers vibes, like her Wayfarers Series books (including The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and A Closed and Common Orbit) or her Monk & Robot novellas (A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy), which also centre a machine consciousness.
Along with their token human, the robots boot up a noodle shop, research how to make the best noodle soup, figure out how to take over the lease, and when success starts coming, fend off review bombers. It’s a great example of a story that has its heart in the right place.
Oh! Wait! I have another.
If you like this kind of story, where a machine intelligence is the POV character, you absolutely can’t go past the Martha Wells Murderbot books. I loved those, too. Really excellent. You might have seen the adaptation on Apple TV.
It appears I have a type.
What’s your favourite machine intelligence POV book? I’m always on the lookout.