Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: artificial intelligence, cozy science fiction, dystopian, robots, science fiction
Pages: 164
Published by Tordotcom on August 5, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
From sci-fi visionary and acclaimed author Annalee Newitz comes Automatic Noodle, a cozy near-future novella about a crew of abandoned food service bots opening their very own restaurant.
While San Francisco rebuilds from the chaos of war, a group of food service bots in an abandoned ghost kitchen take over their own delivery app account. They rebrand as a neighborhood lunch spot and start producing some of the tastiest hand-pulled noodles in the city. But there’s just one problem. Someone―or something―is review bombing the restaurant’s feedback page with fake “bad service” reports. Can the bots find the culprit before their ratings plummet and destroy everything they created?
My Review:
I picked this one up for the title, because really, “Automatic Noodle” or as my brain elided it – noodles. How does that really work? Also, because I’ve been reading a lot of AI and robot stories the past little while, starting with Emergent Properties by Aimee Ogden, Day Zero by C. Robert Cargill and Mal Goes to War by Edward Ashton and I’ve had a great time down that particular reading rabbit-hole so I’ve been looking for more.
Also, this is set in a near-future, sorta/kinda dystopian, somewhat post-apocalyptic San Francisco, and that’s one city that is just plain magic in a way that’s hard to describe. But it is – and it’s the perfect place for this story.
The apocalypse that this particular story is post is war. In particular, a war of secession, as in the Pacific States are no longer the Pacific States of the United States. Which isn’t. Not that ‘Yankeeland’ didn’t try to force them back into the fold with the usual weapons, guns, bombs and propaganda.
Not that they aren’t still working their wiles in a long disinformation campaign, because the more things change, etc., etc., etc. It’s just that in this scenario, substitute robots for people of color, as the new country gave robots above a certain level of AI intelligence very limited rights.
So of course there are humans for whom that is just a bridge too far. As there always are.
The four robots that were keeping one particular – and particularly awful – ghost kitchen operating in the ‘before times’ had been left in place, offline and powered down, just waiting for their corporate bosses – read as overlords – to return and either put them back to work or sell them off.
Instead, through a fluke of programming, the manager-robot wakes up – and he wakes everyone else up as well. As a group, Staybehind, Hands, Cayenne and Sweetie have more than enough intelligence – not to mention free will – to make a go of the restaurant. A real go and not the hell of terrible food and worse customer service the corporate owners turned the place into.
But bots aren’t allowed to own property – among many, many other restrictions. So in order to live their collective dream, they’ll have to fly under the radar very, very carefully. They’re smart enough for that too.
Which is when they run right into the buzzsaw that brings down many a restaurant fully owned and operated by humans even today. They get rating-bombed by a human-firster doing her damndest to drive them out of what might otherwise be a successful, and delicious, business.
Unless she’s just as much of a bot as they are. And they can manage to prove it before it’s too late for both “Automatic Noodle” the restaurant and themselves.
Escape Rating A+: For a story about a collection of bots who have a lot of sharp edges between them, Automatic Noodle is a surprisingly and delightfully cozy and even cuddly story. Because it’s not so much about the bots – although they are the protagonists – as it is about the community they build around themselves, their restaurant, and the neighborhood they bring together and revitalize one bowl of noodles and one open craft night at a time.
It’s also a lovely story about self-realization and actualization, about finding the thing that makes you, well, you, and living your own truth. And it’s about moving on from the depths of grief instead of clinging to the past.
And, as much as it’s a story about robots that I’d recommend highly right along with Emergent Properties and Day Zero and Service Model and Mal Goes to War, the story it reminds me of so strongly that I can’t not talk about it is Naomi Kritzer’s “The Year Without Sunshine,” last year’s Hugo WINNER for Best Novelette, because both are wonderfully cozy stories about the creation of communities under difficult circumstances, and the way that, in the best cases in the worst of times – even if the outside world has gone utterly to shit – the connections built by a supportive community are capable of broadcasting a bright light in even the darkest of places.
Like that earlier story, Automatic Noodle is grounded in the real. In the case of Automatic Noodle, that grounding is in both the way that online reviews – whether real or faked – can make or break ANY business, – along with the way that humans have a nasty tendency to gang up on whatever population they’ve been ginned up or misinformed into using as a scapegoat for all their ills.
What makes this story work is the hopeful aspect of the thing – also that they get a bit of their own back even as they defy the naysayers, the review bombers, the disinformation bots and even their own fears and programming.
Automatic Noodle becomes a team, one that reaches out to its community, which in turn reaches back with love and support, and for once the wheel spins round in a good direction instead of circling towards the drain.
If you’re looking for a story to help you see the good instead of the doom spiral, Automatic Noodle is a tasty treat. I just wish I knew where such marvelous noodles could be found around here!
