Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz is about a group of robots in an unidentified dystopian future of California who discover not only that they have been offline for months, but also that the owners of their restaurant have fled the country. They decide, instead of serving the mix of all the hodgepodge of food their corporate masters only chose because they were the cheapest, they now have the chance to serve the food they want. Staybehind, Hands, Cheyenne, and Sweetie all take on individual roles to get their new restaurant up and running. The way the author uses group chat communication between the bots for dialogue is so well done. We live in the day and age of the group chat, and of course, robots connected to the internet would have one of their own to communicate quickly.

The rights of “human equivalent embodied intelligence” or the HEEI bots is front and center to our main characters as they have to navigate their world with limited rights. Each of the bots gets a moment in the book that explains how they were treated in the past led to their decision to start their own restaurant in the present and why they choose the role they play in it. It culminates in Staybehind’s traumatic backstory, which is handled so well. At first, I found the direction their character was going confusing. They stated concern for the other bots as the books opens with grave seriousness, being both concerned and worried about their future as unlike him they were bots technically owned by someone else. Then, when they come up with the idea of opening the restaurant, he seemed the most reticent of the group. It feels as though Newitz knew this, saving their backstory for last after all the other bots. When it was revealed, not only did everything become clear, but it makes the story all the better on reflection.

Novellas previously have never been a favorite of mine, but the last few years of genre fiction have released some impressive novellas and Automatic Noodle is no exception. It’s so impressive what authors can manage to do in such a few amounts of pages. Automatic Noodle not only gives us the past of all the robots leading to how they ended up in the restaurant business, plus dealing with the list of problems that are needed to solve to bring their restaurant up and running, delves further into developing the characters, gets their business up and running, deals with the development of their signature style of food, and the conflict that comes with it when they grow in popularity enough to catch the ire of groups that are prejudice against non-humans. All of that plus a resolution that is heartwarming. Also, the noodles in this book sound delicious as hell. I’d order from these bots without hesitation.

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Joshua was provided an advance copy of the book by Tor Books.

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