Cover image of "Automatic Noodle," a novella about sentient robots who open a restaurant

California’s long War of Independence has ended. It’s 2064. All of a sudden the new country’s many sentient robots, most of them veterans, face an uncertain future. The president has signed legislation declaring them HEEI (pronounced HE-eye), or Human Equivalent Embodied Intelligence. They’re independent now—except that they can’t reproduce, marry, vote, or own a business. They’re “free” to rent out their labor, or sign it away in a long-term contract. And that’s the reality that four bots wake up to more than a year since their employer, Fritz Co., shut down the fast food restaurant chain where they work, and them with it. But it’s not long before they figure out a way to get around the ownership challenge and set up their own restaurant. They’ll serve fresh, hand-made biang biang noodles. So Annalee Newitz tells us in the opening chapters of her delightful new novella, Automatic Noodle.

A very different class of robots people this light-hearted story

If you think of robots as humanoid automatons marching in lockstep, you’ll meet an entirely different class of sentient machines in this story. These are distinct individuals, with purpose-built bodies and their own interests and feelings. And don’t be surprised if the robots of the future look, act, and think in ways that are closer to Annalee Newitz’s concept than that of the marching minions in the old Apple “1984” Super Bowl commercial.

  • Cayenne is an octobot, a soft, octopus-like robot with eight flexible arms that allow it to juggle multiple tasks simultaneously. And each of her arms can experience a different taste. So it’s ideally suited as a cook and is excited about the plan of owning a restaurant. In the war, by contrast, she served in search-and-rescue, taking advantage of her ability to slither through narrow spaces.
  • However, the biggest booster of the plan is Hands. He’s a barrel-shaped individual with eight appendages that make it possible for him to perform numerous jobs in the kitchen at the same time. And he LOVES to cook.
  • Sweetie, in fact, looks and talks like a pleasant and pretty human woman from the waist up. She hides three legs under long, flowing skirts. Her job is to interface with humans.
  • Staybehind is an eight-foot-tall military robot who took on his name when California’s army left him and several colleagues behind in the state to mop up the remnants of the American army in the tunnels below the cities. He’s reluctant to join in the others’ plan to open a restaurant but unwilling to stand in the way. So, he agrees to manage the facility, fixing and decorating what needs to be done.

Rounding out the crew is a human named Robles. As Sweetie explains, “Fritz Co. hired him to work the front with me on Friday and Saturday nights. He was a courier for the curbside pickups.” And he has nowhere else to go in the shambles that’s San Francisco after the war. Besides, it’s useful to have a human in the team.

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz (2025) 168 pages ★★★★☆

Photo of a swimming robot built like an octopus, similar to one of the sentient robots in this novella
A swimming robot like Cayenne, the octobot chef in Annalee Newitz’s story. Image: NUS Soft Robotics Lab – Tech Xplore

Familiar challenges for restaurant-owners

Ask anyone who’s opened a restaurant in California’s Bay Area, and you’ll find they encounter many of the same hurdles that confront the robot crew in Automatic Noodle. Byzantine regulations. Stifling competition. Review-bombing. And the great difficulty of securing financial support. But Cayenne, Hands, Sweetie, and Staybehind are as resourceful as they come. But the biggest challenge they face is that they’re in the middle of what’s left of a war zone. Unreliable electricity service is just one of the problems.

All the while we follow the robots as they conceive, plan, and open a noodle restaurant, Newitz fills in the background with the grim story of the civil war that ended five years earlier. “Millions had fled the Bay Area after missiles hit Mountain View and Cupertino in ’57,” they write, “but millions had stayed too. San Francisco’s population was a tenth of what it had been before the war, and those who remained were rebuilding with a desperate love.”

An AI reviews the novel

For a broader perspective on this novel, I turned to Claude-AI. Here, verbatim except for a couple of subheads, is the result. It’s well worth reading.

A heart-warming tale about comfort food

In “Automatic Noodle,” Annalee Newitz serves up a heartwarming tale that proves the best comfort food comes with a side of hope. This cozy near-future novella follows four resourceful robots who transform an abandoned ghost kitchen in post-war San Francisco into their own thriving noodle restaurant, specializing in hand-pulled biang biang noodles that would make any foodie weep with joy.

Set in the 2060s after California has seceded from the United States, the story explores what happens when artificial beings gain civil rights—though not quite equal ones. Newitz cleverly uses the familiar struggles of small business ownership to examine deeper questions about personhood, labor, and community. When the robots face review bombing and other modern digital harassment tactics, the novella becomes both a sharp satire of contemporary gig economy woes and a tender meditation on finding belonging.

Balancing weighty themes with genuine warmth

What makes “Automatic Noodle” exceptional is Newitz’s ability to balance weighty themes with genuine warmth. The robots aren’t just philosophical thought experiments; they’re fully realized characters with distinct personalities, dreams, and fears. Their journey from abandoned service bots to entrepreneurial restaurateurs feels both fantastical and surprisingly relatable.

The prose is crisp and inviting, much like the noodles the characters serve. Newitz has a gift for making complex ideas about AI consciousness and civil rights accessible without dumbing them down. The worldbuilding feels lived-in rather than exposition-heavy, creating a San Francisco that’s recognizably familiar yet transformed.

This novella succeeds as both entertaining fiction and thoughtful social commentary. Like the best comfort food, “Automatic Noodle” nourishes on multiple levels, leaving readers satisfied yet hungry for more of Newitz’s unique blend of technological speculation and human—or perhaps post-human—heart.

About the author

Photo of Annalee Newitz, author of this novella about sentient robots who open a restaurant
Annalee Newitz. Image: The Open Notebook

Annalee Newitz is the author of five science fiction novels and author or editor of seven nonfiction books. Several have won literary awards. Born in Irvine, California, in 1969, daughter of two English teachers, Newitz earned a Ph.D. in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley. They have founded or cofounded a podcast, a magazine, a blog, and several other online publications over the years.

Newitz is non-binary, and has used they/them pronouns since 2019. They have been in a relationship with award-winning science fiction author Charlie Jane Anders since 2000.

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