Automatic Noodle

by Annalee Newitz

Hardcover, 176 pages

English language

Published Aug. 5, 2025 by Tordotcom Publishing.

ISBN:: 978-1-250-35746-5
OCLC Number:: 1452443961
ASIN:: 1250357462
Goodreads:: 217388015

(8 reviews)

A cozy near-future novella about a crew of leftover robots opening their very own noodle shop, from acclaimed sci-fi author Annalee Newitz.

You don’t have to eat food to know the way to a city’s heart is through its stomach. So when a group of deactivated robots come back online in an abandoned ghost 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.

But when their robot-run business starts causing a stir, a targeted wave of one-star reviews threatens to boil over into a crisis. To keep their doors open, they’ll have to call on their customers, their community, and each other—and find a way to survive and thrive in a world that wasn’t built for them.

4 editions

Sean Bala reviewed Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

A Warm Bowl of Noodles for the Heart

5 stars

"Automatic Noodle" by Annalee Newitz (@annaleen@wandering.shop) is a cozy, sci-fi novella with a lot of heart. Set in a war-ravaged San Francisco after Californian independence, the book follows a group of robots trying to start a restaurant serving hand-pulled biang biang noodles. In this world, robots with Human Equivalent intelligence have been granted Civil Rights by California. But their existence is limited - they can earn money but cannot have a bank account, vote, or reproduce. Through the experiences of these non-human characters, we see explorations about identity, community, and belonging in a world that resists recognizing the person-hood of those characters. The strength of the book is in its gentle world-building. Newitz does not hit you over the head with too much exposition (one of the big sins of a lot of speculative fiction). The author always keeps the focus on the interior lives of the robots …

Jeri Dansky reviewed Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

A gem of a book

5 stars

I devoured this book in two days. Highly recommended.

Rainer reviewed Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

The book that I needed right now

5 stars

If you have time to read this book, please do it. The characters are well developed, the world building is amazing, and the coziness is top notch. This book is fun, quick, and also quite impactful (or at least it was for me).

enne📚 reviewed Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

Automatic Noodle

4 stars

The shtick: intelligent robots traumatized by war, capitalism, and oppression struggle together to establish a noodle shop in war-torn, separatist San Francisco.

Other than thinking robots and tube delivery technology, the worldbuilding is a fever dream of the current moment despite being set in 2064: it's got crypto, LLMs, delivery apps, ghost kitchens, slang like "rizz". But it's unfair to take this aspect too seriously; it's not a hard sf novel trying to speculate about the future. At its heart, it's a comfy emotional novel about forming community around food in a ruined future.

It's fluffy, it's fun, it was something I needed right now.