Review: Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

Sometimes it’s all about making a buck and keeping one’s business above water… flood water, in a climate catastrophe-altered San Francisco, in a post-war and newly independent California, where the business owners are a small gang of fully sentient robots in an abandoned ghost kitchen. Business as usual, clearly. As the recently liberated nation-state of California slowly rebuilds from the heavy damage it suffered during the conflict, questions of identity and belonging remain as a constant in the minds of its inhabitants, including its population of robots with near-human intelligence. While the latter  has been granted legal personhood, it is of a limited nature—robots are prohibited from owning businesses, voting, or procreation. They also remain in a dependent state of indentured servitude to the owners of their contracts, in perpetual fear of being sold to a buyer in the United States, a hellhole of late-stage capitalism where robots are mere property to be abused. 

It is in this contested space of questionable belonging and identity where we meet our group of robotic friends when they find themselves literally under water and abandoned while booting up after a forced deactivation, all alone in their ghost kitchen after the shady owner of their contracts bailed and fled across the border to the bad old USA. Fearing that their contracts will be bought up by some predatory investment group or company, they come up with a brilliant scheme to not only take control of their lives and futures but also to remain together as a family: they will open a restaurant. Will our plucky crew of robots make it? And, perhaps most important of all, will they figure out how to make the perfect noodle?

The temptation to use food metaphors when writing a review for a book like Automatic Noodle is nearly irresistible, and it will surely make a meal of other reviewers who will most likely feast on the chance. I would like to avoid the unpleasant aftertaste of biting off more clichés than one can chew on, and rather than rely on a buffet of refried food references it would be wiser to digest this delicious novel with a clean palette. 

There, now that I got that out of my system, and gourmand humor aside, Annalee Newitz’s Automatic Noodle is a book that can best be described as a soothing balm in times of absolute madness. At its core, this story is a heartfelt reflection on the nature of identity, camaraderie, and belonging. Personhood is a driving force behind the actions and motivations of our characters, and while the exploration of belonging and personhood is by now a familiar trope in science fiction, this novel goes about it in a clever and more relatable way. Belonging, here, is a shared communal experience tied to the intangible, the liminal aspect of shared experiences that build communities. While traditional Western speculative fiction has for decades obsessed over individualistic narratives to explore identity, Newitz wisely and timely realigns these questions by following a more organic and communal approach. In this story, it literally takes a village in various scales: family, kin (both robotic and human), and, lastly, fellow San Franciscans and Californians.

This last point is a deconstruction of nationalist ideals. Our protagonists are subjects to one another, not to a country or flag even if some of them fought in the war. The incompleteness of their personhood granted by the newly independent California remains a sore subject, while they are haunted by the real fear of losing their legal protections and being forcibly deported to the U.S. where a dark fate would await them. It would be the death of self and of family, of the communal bond in favor of independent greed and state-driven dehumanization. The powerful message here is obvious and tragically timely as our homegrown Gestapo, the much-hated ICE masked goons, continue to kidnap people out in the open and disappear them into our network of concentration camps at home or sell them to prisons abroad.

The United States of Automatic Noodle is unquestionably the enemy, responsible for horrific bombings of cities and population centers during the war, targeting civilians and leaving explosive ordnance to continue causing damage long after their forces on the ground have left. This is the U.S. that many countries know, the imperialistic bully and not the self-righteous “defender of democracy” it touts itself as. Post-war they continued their aggression with social media-centric propaganda operations, using intelligence assets and bot accounts to launch destabilizing campaigns aimed against the Californian population. Some of these operations include fueling anti-robot sentiment, such as review-bombing businesses that employ robots. To anyone aware of how toxic online fandom culture whipped up by “red pilled” internet personalities has become, this tactic sounds all too familiar, and anyone that has read their history of the U.S. knows how easily it is to manufacture public bias against a group of people in order to demonize and persecute them, as it is happening now. 

Automatic Noodle makes the case that space and place go hand-in-hand with developing personhood and community. Identity is not born out of an individualistic and self-centered vacuum but out of what is shared. Food, even if not needed by robots to survive, builds connection, affection, and longstanding bridges founded on care and solidarity. Newitz understands that it really does take a village to live, love, and thrive, and that robots are best when they are at their most human. Long live the perfect noodle.

Miguel A. Cruz Díaz is a native son of the island of Puerto Rico, a paradise currently being devoured by American neo-colonial vultures. He holds a PhD in history from Indiana University. His academic work is centered on the study of anti-fascist resistance, an incredibly timely, and dangerous, subject to be involved with at the moment. When not adding to this FBI dossier by writing public think pieces, Cruz Díaz spends his time reading, writing, playing strategy games, drawing, or building scale models.