The subgenre of “cozy” speculative fiction has recently gained significant popularity. Cozy fantasy and SF generally have low-stakes plots and an optimistic narrative, often with a focus on community and found family. Books like Becky Chambers’s A Psalm for the Wild-Built (2021), Travis Baldree’s Legends and Lattes (2022), and Sangu Mandanna’s The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches (2022) have gained significant popularity in the genre. However, “cozy” books often walk a thin line. While a cozy, low-stakes story can feel like a refreshing palate cleanser—especially following more high-stakes, plot-heavy stories—they can also, if not done well, feel rather trite and banal. Cozy fiction requires a delicate balance, and an emphasis on comfort should not compromise attempts to say something meaningful.
Annalee Newitz is a highly prolific author who has written complex, high-stakes stories of science fiction, like The Terraformers (2023) and The Future of Another Timeline (2019), as well as works of nonfiction like Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age (2022) and Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (2014). Automatic Noodle is their foray into the world of cozy science fiction.
Set in the aftermath of a war which led to California splitting from the rest of the US, Automatic Noodle follows a group of robots who run a restaurant together. What begins as a successful endeavour goes south when the restaurant gets bombarded with one-star reviews, presumably by “robophobes.” The characters—who have names like Staybehind, Hands, and Cayenne—then do all they can to stay afloat and figure out who’s behind the review-bombing.
This slim novella deals with a number of subjects, including artificial intelligence, identity, and oppression. Aside from these, it is also a love letter to one of the author’s favourite dishes, biang biang noodles. “This book started at a counter seat facing the wall in Xi’an Famous Foods in New York’s East Village, where I tasted hot oil biang biang noodles for the first time. Holy shit. My tongue was never the same again, and neither was my brain,” the author writes in the acknowledgements, and this love for the dish seems prevalent throughout the book, as is an atmosphere of comfort. Certainly, the fact that an online hate campaign and review-bombing forms a core plot point of the story made this novella a fun and relevant look at modern-day online culture. However, the book’s attempts to deal with some more serious themes, and the worldbuilding it puts in place to do so, felt to me somewhat clumsy.
The robots in the story have interesting backstories. Many of them face the sort of hardships that people go through in the real world, ranging from workplace harassment to war and conflict. However, they also came across as too human. While there was some explanation about how the robots functioned, there would not have been much of a difference in the bulk of the story if the robots were actually humans. There were a few quick explanations for robots being able to taste and feel, but there was little depth on how robots actually worked.
A large part of the book deals with how robots—who are fully sentient beings in the book—deal with oppression and bigotry from humans. A lot of the oppression the robots face has direct parallels with that faced by marginalized groups in the real world. For example, there is mention of robots possibly “going to sleep as a liberated California resident and [waking] up slaved property in America”—the parallels to slavery in US history are hard to miss. There’s mention of “robot civil rights” being controversial. The negative reviews the restaurant gets bombarded with mention robots “stealing human jobs,” an accusation reminiscent of those often levelled against immigrants. There are accusations of robots adding a mysterious “robot paste”; one of the negative reviews for the restaurant reads: “Robots get out of California.”
Deploying bigotry against robots—or other fictional beings like monsters or aliens—in a way that parallels real life bigotry against real-life marginalized people is not an uncommon trope. However, it can also have rather unsavoury connotations. Being compared to robots or aliens might actually feel rather othering for these groups of people. There’s also the fact robots and aliens are inherently different from humans in a way that different groups of humans are not, making the analogy fall apart once it is seen with some depth. There may be works that make this analogy work in a more nuanced manner; but I did not find it convincing in this book.
Overall, I thought Automatic Noodle fell short whenever it attempted to discuss real-world social issues. There is a section in which the characters discuss the name of the restaurant, “Authentic Noodle,” and the connotations it entails. There’s some discussion about the word “authentic,” and whether it can be applicable to a Chinese restaurant run by robots who have no connection to China. However, the discussion does not really go anywhere. But the one area where the book does excel is in talking about food and eating:
There were a few flavours that nearly every human hated, like rotten eggs and excrement. When it came to predicting what a person would find “tasty”, though, Cayenne had to account for more variables. Preferences could be affected by seemingly irrelevant details like where the human had lived, who had fed them as a child, how much money they had, and even their psychological health.
The descriptions of food, the cozy scenes centered around the restaurant, and the mystery element—who is writing those reviews?—were all well done. I left this book curious about Newitz’s longer, less “cozy,” works. Perhaps one of them has space to deal with its themes in a more interesting manner.