2026 Book Review #32 – Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz
This was the last novella nominated for a Hugo this year on my list. Not at all one I would have read without the commitment to read everything shortlisted for the award, and in this case for good reason. Newitz is apparently a very successful journalist and author in a few different fields, but the name meant absolutely nothing to me before I opened this. Rather, this is very clearly cozy found-family fiction of an incredibly blatant (not to say formulaic) kind, which is very rarely to my taste. As, indeed, this wasn’t.
Automatic Noodle is set in the ruined and rebuilding San Francisco after a bloody war won California’s independence from the United States, and concerned with the robotic staff of a ghost kitchen whose owner stopped paying rent or utilities on no notice. Knocked out of power-saving stasis during a light natural disaster, they find themselves as forgotten by their ‘employer’ as the restaurant around them. So, with some light fraud and the benefit of a system that doesn’t really give a shit as long as bills are paid, they take ownership of the little restaurant for themselves and set out to make some food they can be proud of and that someone might actually enjoy enough to be a repeat customer. There are then a variety of subplots as each main character overcomes their trauma and learns to trust their found family, their amazing noodles are the subject of an astroturfed anti-robot campaign, the restaurant is turned into a welcoming and vibrant community space – you get the idea.
Which is one of my main complaints with the book on a structural level, really. There are just far too many subplots and individual character arcs stuffed into a novella for a single one of them to get any time to breathe. Most of the main cast is lucky to get two scenes establishing and progressing through their arcs before it’s all neatly resolved through the power of found family and a job where you can express yourself. The result feels more like reading the summary or overview of a story than the thing itself – the book would have been incredibly well-served to cut the ensemble or at least some of the other subplots.
On which note – I accept that any story which is outright marketed as cozy isn’t going to have much in the way of high-stakes emotionally brutalizing conflicts. But given that, I really don’t understand why the book spends quite so much time placing large and sinister-looking guns on various mantelpieces only for them to never actually come up again. The very first chapters of the book establish that the robots are only quasi-free second-class citizens, and their ability to run the restaurant in their own right is entirely the result of bureaucratic indifference and neglect. It also establishes that vigilante anti-robot mobs are a real and physical danger that it’s reasonable to worry about. Neither of these things ever actually matters in the slightest. Which is deeply unsatisfying on a storytelling level, and also just a confusing use of very limited and viciously fought-over wordcount.
The conflict-aversion is doubly odd because it isn’t as if this is an entirely utopian or even especially fluffy and positive setting. The San Francisco of the book is something of a bombed-out and half-rebuilt ruin, the war of independence against the rest of the US ended roughly five minutes ago with many refugees and much bad blood, and California itself is full of hypocritical and byzantine restrictions on and discrimination against both robots and those refugees (including the token human major character). The world is chock full of death, misery and structural oppression – but by truly stupendous luck it only ever presents itself to the protagonists and their noodle shop in the form of setbacks that demoralize someone for precisely long enough to require coming together and opening up to each other for comfort and support. For a despised and discriminated-against minority, the book’s robots manage to get through the entire plot without encountering a single actual bigot (even the online review bomber who’s the closest thing the book has to a villain turns out to be a cynical CIA psyop trying to destabilize California. This really doesn’t actually matter).
The book is not even slightly subtle about using ‘robot’ as a broad metaphor for various kinds of structural oppression, with each different character using it for a different one. Which is a proud and storied sci fi tradition that I really can’t hold against it, though I do wish it was a bit less blatant at a few points.
Which is, I suppose, part and parcel with how impossibly Californian this is. Or not even just Californian. This is a book dedicated – without a trace of irony or cynicism – to the city of San Francisco in all its grandeur, and has almost precisely the worldview and commonsense assumptions you would guess from knowing just that fact. It’s a bit charming, often insufferable (the real villain of the story is the future’s answer to Russian bot farms on twitter? Seriously?) and always kind of fascinating.
Fundamentally, this is a self-described cozy story about a found family of marginalized misfits opening a small business centred around a cute and easily romanticized, instagrammable sort of food production. You really do get more or less exactly what was advertised (well, barring a meet-cute and coffee date or two), and under most circumstances I would have heeded my instincts and just given it a pass entirely. Still, reading outside one’s normal taste is a valuable and virtuous exercise. Though even grading relative to the rest of the subgenre I didn’t find this especially impressive. Becky Chambers wrote a better semi-fugitive AI finding happiness and fulfillment via restaurant management book back in 2016, and that’s not even a good description of A Close and Common Orbit. Which (or the Wayfarers series in general) I’d probably recommend over this, honestly. Not that you should trust my judgment on these things.
