Clearly we're now in a post-'Murderbot' world and Annalee Newitz is the latest writer to jump onto that bandwagon. 'Automatic Noodle' is such a feel-good story that it's almost impossible to not like it, but it has its problems and, the more I think about the book, the more they seem to grow.

As with 'The Murderbot Diaries', this is a way to explore what it means to be human through a lens of sentient robots and its real value is through metaphor. This is a story about what it means for a particular group of people to be legal citizens but not equal in the eyes in the law. We see them as a quartet of bots classified as HEEI, or Human-Equivalent Embodied Intelligence, but we can think of them as being any other minority at all and the fairness, or lack of it, would still apply. Newitz is especially referencing the LGBTQ+ community but the metaphor would work just as perfectly with women, people of colour or any other minority.

They're legal because we're in the Nation of California, newly liberated from the United States in a war. When we begin, in January 2064, that war is over and California is free, as are all HEEI bots. Well, theoretically. They're legal citizens, but they don't have equal rights. They can earn money, but they can't keep it in a bank. They can associate with whoever they like, but they can't marry. They can rent property, but they can't own it. And, of course, they can and did fight in the war for California but they can't vote in its subsequent elections. Every minority feels that.

Anyway, they have so few rights that they even start the book shutdown. They've been working in a restaurant called Burgers N More on Douglass St in San Francisco but the owning company, Fritz Co., is clearly hinky and, in the face of legal investigation, has abandoned everything and jumped the border with the US. That means no restaurant and no restaurant means no need for any bots to staff it, so they shut them all down. And this novella would end right there if Staybehind wasn't ex-military, but apparently bots like him can't be fully shut down and, six months later, floodwater lapping around his feet triggers a protocol and he wakes up. He boots up the others, they clean up the place and they figure out what's going on.

Under Fritz Co., the food at Burgers N More was always a scam, but these bots take pride in their work and decide to open up shop again to make and sell good food for once. Hands, who's a torso with large arms, is a gourmet chef who decides to specialise in biang biang noodles. Cayenne, an octopus bot who was fitted during the war with "an olfactory-gustatory sensor array" to sniff out dangerous chemicals, figures out when Hands gets it right. Cayenne also contacts the contract, a fellow sentient slice of data, and takes on its custody.

And, after a whole bunch of group chats and in collaboration with Sweetie, the fourth of the bots, and Robles, an actual human being, they open up Authentic Noodles for takeout orders to speedy success. The end.

Well, no, it's not the end because that might reach the word count of a novelette. This is a novella but it doesn't really add a lot more in the way of story than that. That rise is followed by a fall and another rise for a relatively traditional arc. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of substance to either of those acts, which is arguably the worst thing about the book. Maybe Newitz should have bulked this up to novel length after all. This structure isn't inherently bad, it's merely underdeveloped.

The fall is agreeably frustrating. Hands makes good biang biang and people like it, so they have a pretty solid rating above four out of five on San Francisco's key app, GrandoSando. Then they get their first one star rating and it's from someone alleging that Authentic Noodle is a ghost kitchen, meaning that it's staffed by robots. Which is actually true. It seems that there are people who are unhappy that HEEI bots have gained legal status so they have Vigilance Committees to hinder any activity they might try. That's where the title comes from, the snarky suggestion that this place is more like Automatic Noodle than Authentic Noodle.

Oddly, that never gets physical. Nobody shows up to hurl bricks through the restaurant's window or torch the place. They just post 1-star reviews on GrandoSando as a review bombing effort. The app prioritises what it displays by reputation, so game that average rating down under a three to hide Authentic Noodles from anyone not specifically searching for it. So that fall is a literal fall, in ratings at least, and the rise that follows is the solution the bots come up with to counter the anti-bot sentiment. I won't tell you what they do, but I will say that it's a little predictable and hardly a final step. The real end isn't any more of an end than the fake one I floated above.

I have to wonder what Newitz was trying to do here. This is a very simple story that feels YA and is promising material for an animated kids film, except that there's a lot of material to counter that YA category. There are a lot of F words, for a start. Sweetie also has her breasts removed, because the nipples feel creepy to her. That's not inappropriate, especially as these free bots are figuring out who and what they are, but a lot of parents might believe differently and, nowadays, that's a crucial concern for anyone seeking widespread success. It's a small scene trivially removed.

As I mentioned 'Murderbot' in my first line, I should add that these bots do have gender but there isn't much insight into what that means. Sweetie had obvious breasts so was designed female. But Hands doesn't have any bits, being a torso with arms and Cayenne was built octopoid. What shows us that he's male and she's female? They don't seem interested in gender identity either, even as romance is floated as possibility. Does being attracted to a female robot make you male? That's a weird stretch. The only other change is that Staybehind used to be called Ascot but changed that aspect of his identity. All these details could have been explored but Newitz mostly avoids that.

She also avoids exploring the creative aspects of what these HEEI bots do. Hands thinks of himself as a gourmet chef and he certainly seems to make really good biang biang noodles, but that's just as far as the depth goes. He works hard and makes a good product and he should be proud of that in the same way as, say, a rat might be if he was doing the same thing. However, to shift the term in play, an HEEI bot is an AI in a robot body and that opens this up to a whole new level of criticism. Is Newitz suggesting that we should equate ChatGPT with a wacky anthropomorphic character in a Disney movie and get right behind it? Tying that to civil rights feels like a weird flex. Is she saying that Grok or DeepSeek or Gemini should be given citizenship? Suddenly, this feels offensive.

So, the more I think about this, the more problematic it becomes. It's best read on the surface, as a traditional cartoon story of the underdogs winning out against bigotry, with the only depth that we should consider being what free and equal mean to minorities. The good guys are given some characterisation and depth, but the bad guys are kept off screen and one note. This is meant to be a happy story and we should clearly ignore anything unhappy as much as possible, along with what motivation comes along with that.

This is my second Annalee Newitz and, while this is good old-fashioned sappy fun, 'Autonomous' is by far the better book. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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