Automatic Noodle

[psocoptera]

Automatic Noodle, Annalee Newitz, 2025 SF novella. Delightful story about robots opening a restaurant and finding safety, purpose, and community after war. Cheerfully trans-coded (there's a casual lunch-break top surgery, and some celebratory balloons that just happen to be blue, pink, and white), not in an allegorical way but more like a team-colors kind of way. Deals with indenture and the risk of enslavement but in a much less bleak way than Terraformers, like, the post-war world here is still new and unsettled and developing, it didn't feel like a world where inequality and injustice were just inevitable forever. And I have no idea if Newitz ever thought about other geographical parallels for the drastically reduced populations of small city-nations on western coasts trying to rebuild from the rubble of wars of survival with the more powerful nation hemming them in to the east, but that unspoken "it could happen here" made it more powerful, and I appreciated this book's vision of peace that manages to hold and a flourishing rebuilding, whether for near-future San Francisco or anywhere else. Very much recommended.