Do Robots Dream of Electric Noodles?: Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

 It’s the year 2060, and California is struggling to recover from its war with the rest of the continental United States after seceding. In a war-torn San Francisco, a group of Human Equivalent Embodied Intelligences (HEEI, for short, or robots that have evolved sentience) have awoken in the abandoned restaurant where they had all been shut down. However, HEEI still aren’t necessarily afforded the same rights as everyone else, so they must keep the loss of their former corporate employers secret in order to stay together. So what should they do to be kept from being scrapped or worse - separated?

Welcome to Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz.

Now I’m just craving noodles. 

Since this is a novella, I don’t want to give too much of the plot away, but I DO want to talk about three major themes (out of many) that resonated with me. 

First, there is the idea that corporate culture focuses so much on the bottom line that they forget the people (or robots) that help make them successful. It’s easier to throw away a quarter of your workforce than tell the shareholders and CEO they aren’t getting a bigger bonus this year. The HEEI in the story are shut down remotely and left to rot in a building that is nearly destroyed by the war, because the company who owns their contracts has decided to cut some losses. This idea of cutting from the bottom instead of from the top is something we see all the time now - CEOs get bonuses and a second yacht, while the factory worker who put together the car or the cashier on the frontlines during the holidays can’t afford health insurance or are fired to help pay for those bonuses. 

Second, transformation. Each character goes through a bit of their own transformation, but none so relevant as Sweetie. They are a front-of-the-house host, where appearances were incredibly important. They were designed to look like a human female, in order to put humans at ease. But Sweetie does not care for their appearance, as they were designed to cover up what they are. In the process of reinventing themselves, they embrace their mechanical portions - adding lights, revealing their inner workings, and become who they want to be, not who they were designed to be. You can trace this change to those of us who are born in the wrong bodies - forced to live based on what society expects us to be. Unlike Sweetie, transitioning or altering our bodies can be painful, time consuming, and sometimes life-threatening. Just like Sweetie, though, we face judgment and misunderstanding because we don’t wish to fit in. All we can do is try to live as we are. 

Third, the make-or-break way of social media when it comes to small business. When the robots finally get their business off the ground, they start dealing with review-bombing by a potential hate group. This isn’t a huge stretch of the imagination - people do this no matter what the business is (or whether they even live in the area). When a company does something legitimately wrong, it’s one thing. But unfortunately, people use social media sites like Yelp as a tool for both promoting their personal beliefs AND punishing those who don’t agree with them. Smaller businesses are basically required to keep a social media presence in order to survive and often deal with hate speech or bullying, especially if they are minority- or queer-owned. It also happens with media - video games are review bombed because of their content or because of their creators (I mean, there was a game on Steam that had a perfect track record until one person decided to be “different” and give them a negative review, despite enjoying the game). While having negative reviews isn’t inherently a bad thing, it becomes bad when it is used as a way to drive the algorithms. Fortunately, our poly-synthetic heroes find a way to turn the negative into a positive.

As I stated, this is a novella, but it packs a punch with each chapter as it explores the above themes and more. Newitz’s talent is on full display with the way they address some of these more delicate themes and show us that we can persevere when we find our community and begin to engage with it directly, instead of just through our algorithms. 

I recommend this book if you enjoy The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells or The Monk and the Robot series by Becky Chambers.

Remember - when the noodles are pulled and the places are set, I shall be here with another suggestion, should you need it.