Hardcover, 176 pages
English language
Published Aug. 5, 2025 by Tordotcom Publishing.
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.
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).
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.
Robots want to set up a noodle restaurant.
It takes a top notch writer to turn that premise into a story that's both sweet and exciting.
Annalee Newitz is that author.
Purchasable
Purchasable
Purchasable
https://bookshop.org/p/books/automatic-noodle-annalee-newitz/625018d0518991aa.https://bookshop.org/p/books/automatic-noodle-annalee-newitz/625018d0518991aa.https://bookshop.org/a/102303/9781250357465.