The year is 2064 and California is recovering from a war, having seceded from the United States. A group of surviving robots decide to start a small neighborhood Biangbiang noodle restaurant.
This is the story behind science journalist and writer Annalee Newitz’s 2025 cozy sci-fi novella Automatic Noodle. Newitz is the author of several books and has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Popular Science and Scientific American, among many other publications.
In a recent What We’re Reading interview, Newitz described the main conflict in Automatic Noodle stemmed from customers leaving bad reviews on a food app despite the robots' delicious noodles.
She explained, “One of the struggles that the robots have is that they keep getting delisted from this service because people complain that they're robot-owned. I wanted to have recognizable conflicts and technologies but also add in the absolutely speculative element of having robots who are basically human equivalent."
Newitz found that the robots made a great metaphor for all kinds of people who arrive at a new nation but whose citizenship status isn’t easy to define.
She said, “We think of it as citizen or non-citizen oftentimes, but that's not true. There's all these gradations in between, especially for new immigrants or people who've been newly recognized as people in this case. And so I really wanted to give people that combination of familiar and unfamiliar that I think is the magic of science fiction.”
But why noodles? Newitz has been a fan of Biangbiang noodles since introduced to them at Xi’an’s Famous Foods in New York City.
Newitz explained, “Biangbiang noodles are very special because they're very chewy and wide. And making them is a whole beautiful production where you kind of stretch the noodle by hand and smack it against the counter to keep stretching it and stretching it. And I just fell in love with them, partly because of the texture and partly because of the artistry in making them.”
Food, according to Newitz, is important to Automatic Noodle because “food is about care and it's about art and community—all the things that make us people.”
Learn more about Annalee Newitz and their work on their webpage.
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