A cosy near-future story of finding purpose and found family — through noodles — in a bleak future.

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.

I’ve not read as many of Newitz’s works as I would like, but everything I have read I’ve very much enjoyed. I happened to get the DRC of this one just after finishing a longer read, and I dove right in, drawn to the premise. Hooked from early on, I enjoyed this.

The robots at the heart of this novella had been deactivated, but find themselves reawakened and in a strange limbo state: Who owns them? What is their purpose? What can they do now? One of their number has a fascination with food — the fragrances, the textures, the flavours, all of it. In a San Francisco devastated by a war, the robots decide to open a noodle shop, which brings a much-needed ray of light into a community that is only slowly recovering.

It turns out, too, that they are very good at making noodles. However, while this comes as a pleasant surprise for the robots, it is not a welcome fact amongst everyone; the shop finds itself the target of a review-bombing campaign, one tinged with anti-robot vitriol. Pulling together, and with the help of many within the community, they work to keep their shop going and keep sharing their food. As they are doing this, they must also navigate a world (and economy) that doesn’t really have space for autonomous robots. Through some clever and amusingly-written machinations and legal maneuvering, though, they work to keep their agency and remain free.

Automatic Noodle is a quick, enjoyable read. A must read for fans of the author’s work already, but also highly recommended to anyone looking for something a little different, a little more hopeful, in these darker times. (It should certainly appeal to fans of Becky Chambers’s Monk & Robot novellas, also published by Tordotcom.)

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Annalee Newitz’s Automatic Noodle is due to be published by Tordotcom in North America and in the UK, on August 5th.

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Review copy received via NetGalley