#automatic noodle

“This is a story—about building community despite adversity, fighting for your rights and individuality, and creating art that you want to see in the world—that I didn’t know I needed right now. And it was so much fun to read!” —Martha Wells, author of The Murderbot Diaries and Witch King

This advertisement is for Automatic Noodle, a heartwarming near future novella by Annalee Newitz.

WHAT’S IT ABOUT

When a crew of deactivated robots comes back online in an abandoned kitchen, they decide to make their own way doing what they know: making food—the tastiest hand-pulled noodles around—for the humans of San Francisco, who are recovering from a devastating war.

BOOK OF THE MONTH CHALLENGE: APRIL

April's pull was Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz and I was so excited for this, it sounded so cute and so fun so tell me why it was absolute dogshit. Newitz clearly tried to make commentary on xenophobia, it's obvious from the blurb, but they failed so miserably. They tried to deal with complicated feelings about trauma, but it was so brushed past it barely left a mark. What's the point of addressing trauma in robots when these robots can just dump the memories into long term storage to "process" it? It feels like magical healing. Murderbot accomplished this in a much more skillful and concise way.

I admit, the top surgery scars with LED blinking lights is cool as hell. But something about that whole interaction doesn't sit right with me. There's a bit where that robot comes across a human who says hey! cool mod! you look like a robot! and she gets SO upset and says Humans Will Never Understand. Understand wanting to change who you are to match what you feel? Really? When you just got five minute top surgery with no healing time? It's like you're trying to make a better world by throwing the hardships real life people go through under the bus and it doesn't sit well with me.

Sure thing! (All links go to our catalog.)

Sarah recommends:

Cinder by Marissa Meyer: Cyborg Cinderella. Book 1 of the Lunar Chronicles

Robin recommends:

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz. This one is a novella about robots working in a 'ghost kitchen' who decide to turn it around and make it the best darn hand-pulled noodle joint in post-liberation California!

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers. I cheated a little here; this one follows a human POV, but the other main character is a robot - the first robot to contact humanity since the days when robots gained sentience and disappeared into the wild.

Other people recommend:

That's a pretty short list, so I went ahead and grabbed some others that none of us have read, but that we've heard good things about. Your mileage may vary! (Summaries here are paraphrased from the publishers.)

Emergent Properties by Aimee Ogden: An AI reporter comes online to find ze is missing zir memories of the past 10 days. Ze must retrace zir steps to figure out what story ze was chasing and how everything went so wrong.

Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky: A robot valet murders its owner and leaves its house for the first time - only to discover that the world has ended and it is now free to tour the post-apocalypse.

The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances by Glenn Dixon: A robot vacuum, inspired by the books the human of her household reads aloud, sets out to save him from eviction.

The Obsoletes by Simeon Mills: Two brothers who are secretly robots navigate high school in a conservative town that would disassemble them if their secret got out.

The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag: An illustrated novella following a teen girl and her robot across an America littered with the trash and detritus of a high-tech consumerist society.

I got to design a logo for a hand-pulled noodle shop run by robots for @annaleenewitz's latest novella! Auotmatic Noodle comes out on August 5th, but you can preorder it now. It's hopeful and sweet and funny and will make you want biangbiang noodles somethin' fierce. (You can even buy goofy merch about it if you like the design.)

Automatic Noodle is not really bad (though hardly to my taste, and would have done better cut down into a short story instead of an oddly meandering novella).

East Bay peeps! Come see me and FOUR other incredible speculative fiction authors talking about our books at Pegasus Books, 2349 Shattuck Ave. Weds. Oct 1 @ 7 PM.

Featuring Sarah Gailey, Annalee Newitz, Susanna Kwan and Lio Min.