160 pages
English language
Published Aug. 5, 2025 by Tor Publishing Group.
From sci-fi visionary and acclaimed author Annalee Newitz comes Automatic Noodle, a cozy near-future novella about a crew of abandoned food service bots opening their very own restaurant. While San Francisco rebuilds from the chaos of war, a group of food service bots in an abandoned ghost kitchen take over their own delivery app account. They rebrand as a neighborhood lunch spot and start producing some of the tastiest hand-pulled noodles in the city. But there’s just one problem. Someone—or something—is review bombing the restaurant’s feedback page with fake “bad service” reports. Can the bots find the culprit before their ratings plummet and destroy everything they created?
From sci-fi visionary and acclaimed author Annalee Newitz comes Automatic Noodle, a cozy near-future novella about a crew of abandoned food service bots opening their very own restaurant. While San Francisco rebuilds from the chaos of war, a group of food service bots in an abandoned ghost kitchen take over their own delivery app account. They rebrand as a neighborhood lunch spot and start producing some of the tastiest hand-pulled noodles in the city. But there’s just one problem. Someone—or something—is review bombing the restaurant’s feedback page with fake “bad service” reports. Can the bots find the culprit before their ratings plummet and destroy everything they created?
I thoroughly enjoyed being immersed in the world of robots trying desperately to succeed with a noodle restartant. The characters were wonderfully weird, and the story moved at a perfect pace. I was delighted that part of the conclusion of the story included moving to a proper old website from an enshittified food delivery site.
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Purchasable
https://bookshop.org/p/books/automatic-noodle-annalee-newitz/625018d0518991aa.https://bookshop.org/p/books/automatic-noodle-annalee-newitz/625018d0518991aa.https://bookshop.org/a/102303/9781250357465.