Automatic for the Robots

I feel conflicted about Automatic Noodle, the latest novella from Annalee Newitz.

On the one hand, Newitz is one of my favorite thinkers and writers in the area of science and society: whether fiction or nonfiction. And, on that same hand, the cast of robot characters in the novel are lovable and engaging — the restaurant they build together sounds lovely and cozy.

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Automatic Noodles  
By Annalee Newitz
Tordotcom; 176 pages

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On the other hand, though, the novella seems somewhat twee and, if not glib, then glib-adjacent. If, as the Oxford Languages dictionary suggests, “glib” means “fluent, voluble, insincere and shallow” then Automatic Noodle is fluent, voluble, totally sincere and more shallow than it ought to be.

When musicians used to be able to make money from vinyl sales, The Cure released “The Lovecats” as a single. It was a lot of fun, but it was clearly written specifically as a single with none of the depth of their previous work. It felt glib, too. But, over the years, it has been incorporated into the band’s general oeuvre and, indeed, overshadowed as an egregious commercial ploy by “Friday I’m in Love.”

So that’s how I feel about Automatic Noodle. I like it, but it does not really, yet, seem worthy of Newitz.

Here’s the setup. In the aftermath of a war between America and California a group of robots band together to turn their cut-price ghost kitchen into a real restaurant. Abandoned by their former human employers they only have their wits and skills to survive the exigencies of climate change, supply chains, social media influencers, robophobia, and the economy.

The novella starts with Stay Behind because that’s the robot whose emergency military reboot wakes us up. Without that plot device Stay Behind, Cayenne, Sweetie, and Hands would have remained deactivated in their abandoned kitchen. His first act is to turn on the other three and, although it doesn’t feel too shoehorned in, Newitz is careful to give each of the four robots a back story, a special associated topic — PTSD for Stay Behind — and a short plot arc.

To make a short story even shorter: the robots and a single human helper set up a restaurant plausibly independent of humans and start trying to build independence and a super-cozy community: meeting challenges and suspicion on the way. Unsurprisingly, they sell delicious noodles and their preparation is mouth-wateringly described. If you read the book, you will want to eat noodles.

Newitz dedicates the book to “San Francisco, the city that saved my life, and all the people I have loved there.” It is, despite the ravaged state in which it is portrayed, a loving evocation of the city and its inhabitants. But it isn’t really a very profound exploration of the people — and I include HEEI (Human Equivalent Embodied Intelligence) individuals in that group.

As semi-promised by the Fredric Jameson quotation that Newitz uses as an epigraph, the robots stand in for the despised of the community. “If everything means something else, then so does technology,” he wrote in “Totality as Conspiracy” and here the robots, for Newitz, “mean” the traumatized refugees, the immigrants, the LGBTQ+ folk, the Jews — whoever is getting picked on for political gain.

There are two problems with the multiple identification of the HEEIs. First, that in our current early stage of AI, it’s vital to stress at all points that AI does not have feelings or motivations or consciousness in any way. I’m sure that Newitz would argue that in half a century from now HEEI’s might have consciousnesses that are not only analogous to human ones, but also alike in kind, to human consciousnesses. But, as a book that wants us to love San Francisco and plucky outsiders now, it is asking us to love robots that are not robots and, unhelpfully, to love immigrants as if they are robots.

Second, and a more substantive critique that does not rely on second-guessing speculative technology, is that the brevity of the novella means that the plots and the characters are two dimensional. The stories are distributed and even, occasionally, emotionally compelling but, without character development, they just feel tokenistic. Though neither a sentient illuminated octobot nor a food processor with consciousness might seem like archetypes, Cayenne and Hands form a cute archetypal couple as a hedgehog (good at one thing only) and a fox (sly, good at everything).

Actually, though, Cayenne as a cunning capitalist good with the law, seems like a recognizable stereotype despite the physical camouflage, as does Stay Behind as a traumatized soldier with a heart of gold. Sweetie, for her part, is glad to get rid of the over-gendered and over-human adornments of her design that hides her true robot, nongendered self. Maybe she’s not a universal stereotype, but she’s certainly a type that folks in San Francisco know well.

In the strict confines of a very short 176 pages, though, none of them have a chance to evince much character beyond their designated plot. They have no space to simply be themselves. Even the challenges they face individually or as a group are relatively simply set up and surmounted, giving a sense of barely won delight.

In The Seeds of Time, Jameson — who sadly passed away last year – seems to directly critique books like Automatic Noodle that imagine a place that’s both worse and better, but still revolving around the same fundamental economic principles, “It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imagination.”

But perhaps the last word of review should come from The Cure’s Robert Smith, who in two lines of “Why Can’t I Be You?” points out the three elemental truths of Automatic Noodle: That the characters are good, unrealistically so, and that the book whets the reader’s appetite!

“You’re so wonderful, too good to be true

You make me, make me, make me, make me hungry for you”