Em’s got a book review for you now!

Title: Automatic Noodle

Author: Analee Newitz

Genre: Cozy Science Fiction

San Francisco is now separated from the United States in a post-war era; it is in this dystopian landscape that we are introduced to our robot friends, termed HEEI (human equivalent embodied intelligence). They wake up to find that the restaurant they had been working in has closed, a storm flooding the interior. Upon researching further, they realize the owners of the establishment have skipped town, but not officially closed the business. With robot-owned and operated businesses being illegal, our group must try to find a way to stay in business so they don’t default on their leases and become repossessed. 

To start with, things I enjoyed: I enjoyed the creativity of the story, the unique personalities of the robot ensemble cast (along with a human ally!), and the parallels drawn between the experience of marginalized groups (specifically, immigrants) in our society today and the experience of the HEEI. 

For our main crew: Staybehind is a retired retrieval bot who has things in his wartime past he’d rather not revisit, Hands in the head chef who had the good fortune of being brought online as the war was ending, Sweetie is the customer service bot with rolling legs and a human-like upper torso, and Cayenne manages the business while taste testing the flavors with his enhanced octopus-like legs. 

These characters came to life in a charming and sympathetic way, showing differences in background, personality, history, and approach to life. I was rooting for the noodle shop to remain open and the HEEI to succeed.

And that brings me to the things that made me raise an eyebrow: while I did understand the sentient robots as parallels for how immigrants are treated (because, let’s be real, if we did manage to reach the point of sentient robots, they WOULD be treated as second class and exploited), it was certainly a choice in the age of generative AI to write an entire book attempting to make me take the side of technology over humanity. 

Granted, there are delineated differences between LLMs as we know them today, scraping others’ work and intellectual property without compensation and regurgitating it as something new, vs. the robots in the story who were not interconnected and had their own thoughts, visions, and histories. However, while it managed to be a charming story taken out of the current context, the current context still exists and it’s worth noting that AI has very serious implications environmentally, ethically, and for those who have been impacted by job loss, financially.

The second most notable thing that I did not enjoy was the fact that in a book labeled “cozy”, not only were there references to SA, but a flashback of what gave Staybehind PTSD during his time in the war. Neither of these references fit inside the “cozy” landscape I was expecting, and were very jarring to encounter in a book labeled as such.

Overall, it’s a very thought-provoking work on many fronts, and kudos to the author for worldbuilding because I DID want the robots to succeed… but that in itself raises another conversation entirely.