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Synopsis:
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?
Review:
Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz is one of the novellas that was on my radar since it’s release earlier this year. The story is about a group of food service bots that wake up after a five month shut down due to a war and flooding in San Francisco and decide to open a noodle shop. Before, they were working at a burger place, but when they reboot, they wake to an empty and abandoned restaurant. The four bots decide they need money to pay their debts for their freedom and to continue to have a place to live, so their best ideas to fix these problems is to start a restaurant on their own, even though it is illegal. Bots are not allowed to won property, vote, or become citizens. They have to run the restaurant through a human proxy, Robles, in the hopes that nobody asks too many questions. In the end, they are seeking success and freedom in a society that looks all bots as property with no rights.
This takes place post civil war society, a battle between California and the United States. San Francisco is rebuilding at the time. The story does not spend too much time on the things that lead up to the war, what happen during the battles, or why they were abandoned months earlier, but we do know that one of the bots, StayBehind, is an ex-military soldier bot that no longer has a job and is no longer useful to humans. Automatic Noodle is all a thinly veiled story about being viewed as property, social prejudice, and the feelings of being lost after your usefulness is finished. The story does lean heavy on making sure the reader understands this is also a story about the way society treats marginalized people, but the message is wrapped up in such a nice, feelgood triumph story about noodles that it is acceptable.
The noodles that the bots decide to sell are Chinese biang biang noodles, a unique and difficult hand rolled noodle they serve with fresh ingredients. Their food brings people into their noodle shop and everyone who eats their dishes are impressed, sometimes even having the bowl of noodles bring fond memories from the past. The truth is food has a transporting capacity, that a single dish can take someone back to their childhood or to a place they remember fondly. The bots cooking and selling these noodles is a way to transport the people left in San Francisco after the war to a better time. The success is the deliciousness of the food but also the way it lets everyone feel like things will work out. This type of food is a comfort and allows a person to focus on other things that are less comfortable. In real life, many foods do this job, and food can be a comfort a person uses to get through difficult situations. Unfortunately comfort food alone does not solve problems, it just allows a person a place to leave their troubles for a meal. Automatic Noodle is a nice cozy sci-fi novella that is like comfort food in it’s own way, a story that makes you feel good and escape from all of the other things in life that are more difficult.
ghostvillehero 