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sterling8 's review for:
Automatic Noodle
by Annalee Newitz
emotional
hopeful
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This is a queer kind of cozy science fiction and I mean that in several senses of the word.
First, the protagonists are all robots. We have Staybehind, a former military bot; Sweetie, a bot with the upper part of a cute girl and the lower part of an office chair's rollers; Cayenne, a former search and rescue bot shaped like an octopus; and Hands, a barrel shaped bot who is the cook in the franchise ghost kitchen in which they find themselves abandoned.
Once left to their own devices, these robots decide to make a go of the restaurant on their own. Hands wants to make actually good food instead of the reconstituted prepackaged slop which they had been serving, and he hits on the idea of hand-pulled noodles. Most of the book is about how these bots cobble what they need together from what they can scavenge around them and how they become a team in the process.
One way in which the story is queer is that for a cozy novella, I felt a lot of stress reading it. The book takes place in 2063 and California has recently won a war of independence with "America". Half of the bots we get to know served in the war and most of them have some trauma that they are working through because of it. There's some joy in seeing San Francisco rebuild itself after the war and seeing how tenacious those who remained are. But I really felt for the damage that the characters had experienced.
The other way in which the story is queer is that the bots are clearly stand-ins for queer people. Although bots have been given their freedom in California after the war instead of remaining enslaved and they have some rights, there is a lot of prejudice against them. One of the obstacles the restaurant faces is review bombing and the bad reviews are all about how food made by robots is tainted and bad. Sweetie transforms herself physically to feel more like herself.
Staybehind makes the restaurant a cozy, welcoming space and when the review bombs start affecting the place, the bots decide to make their space open for people to enjoy instead of just doing takeout orders.
Between the shadow of war and the prejudice theme and the reminder that people can be horrible (review bombs) this book was a mixed bag of a comfort read for me. It also ends abruptly. It just sort of stops more than it ends. I definitely did want some hand-pulled noodles after reading this but the book also made me sad. Maybe because a near-future war for the future of the United States doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility.
First, the protagonists are all robots. We have Staybehind, a former military bot; Sweetie, a bot with the upper part of a cute girl and the lower part of an office chair's rollers; Cayenne, a former search and rescue bot shaped like an octopus; and Hands, a barrel shaped bot who is the cook in the franchise ghost kitchen in which they find themselves abandoned.
Once left to their own devices, these robots decide to make a go of the restaurant on their own. Hands wants to make actually good food instead of the reconstituted prepackaged slop which they had been serving, and he hits on the idea of hand-pulled noodles. Most of the book is about how these bots cobble what they need together from what they can scavenge around them and how they become a team in the process.
One way in which the story is queer is that for a cozy novella, I felt a lot of stress reading it. The book takes place in 2063 and California has recently won a war of independence with "America". Half of the bots we get to know served in the war and most of them have some trauma that they are working through because of it. There's some joy in seeing San Francisco rebuild itself after the war and seeing how tenacious those who remained are. But I really felt for the damage that the characters had experienced.
The other way in which the story is queer is that the bots are clearly stand-ins for queer people. Although bots have been given their freedom in California after the war instead of remaining enslaved and they have some rights, there is a lot of prejudice against them. One of the obstacles the restaurant faces is review bombing and the bad reviews are all about how food made by robots is tainted and bad. Sweetie transforms herself physically to feel more like herself.
Staybehind makes the restaurant a cozy, welcoming space and when the review bombs start affecting the place, the bots decide to make their space open for people to enjoy instead of just doing takeout orders.
Between the shadow of war and the prejudice theme and the reminder that people can be horrible (review bombs) this book was a mixed bag of a comfort read for me. It also ends abruptly. It just sort of stops more than it ends. I definitely did want some hand-pulled noodles after reading this but the book also made me sad. Maybe because a near-future war for the future of the United States doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility.