I don’t read much cozy sci-fi (though this is my second one this year), but there’s something about Automatic Noodle that grabbed me. I want to say that it wasn’t just marketing, but it kind of was. From the colourful cover art, to the cute title, to the low-stakes story premise of a ragtag group of forgotten robots working to open a noodle restaurant — it all appealed to the Pixar movie fan in me. Fun as all that might sound, I’m not sure that the novella lived up to that promise of entertainment with a heart. Added to these basics, there was also an intriguing sci-fi backdrop of a California that has survived a war of secession and is now an independent nation from the rest of America. While it would have added a whole other dimension of political speculation, that idea got shoved aside for most of the story.

Going back to the Pixar comparison, the best summary I can make of this story is that it’s kind of a Toy Story for grown-ups. The characters follow Pixar’s template: mixing up a varied bunch of anthropomorphic individuals: a beaten-down robot hero (who’s got trauma from the war with America), a female looking robot who works the register, an assembly-line bot who is mostly a pair of arms and hands, and an electronic octopus with enhanced senses. They were all supposed to be robots, with robot concerns, but they actually didn’t act much like robots (as we traditionally know them). They had no issue with expressing human feelings — they were dripping with them — one character even went through a bout of depression. For most of the story the robot characters supposedly interact via digital conversation (kind of a WhatsApp style group chat), but occasionally they would also speak — especially for the benefit of their human allies. Sometimes they needed stuff for the shop that would put them into physical adventures — just like when Buzz had to rescue Woody from the box of discarded toys. I think it all would have worked well, following that Toy Story formula, except that the writing didn’t quite bring as much visual flair as what Pixar artists could have done; and an uninteresting detour into the world of online reviews not only felt dated (Hello, Yelp: The Early Years!) but also became more of a distraction than the builder of emotional stakes that I think it was meant to do (Oh no! A one-star review! What will we do now?). I think there were many other subplots and story ideas that could have been more fruitfully explored.

I also thought it was unwise for Newitz to choose a Chinese hand-pulled noodle shop as the goal of these robots. If the robots were meant as an allegory for immigrants, or “the other”, it seemed odd to have them want to become like a real-world minority group and adopt that culture’s food. Doesn’t that make Chinese culture feel even more exotic and “other”? Doesn’t that run counter to the theme of cultural acceptance and melting-pot blending? I think it would have been better if the robots either chose a restaurant idea that was absolutely mainstream (like burgers), or go the other way and invent something uniquely robot-derived (but edible for humans) like some kind of 3D printed foods that everyone craves because the robots make it tap into the nervous system … something like that.

I have yet to really discover what makes cozy sci-fi appealing to readers: Is it the low-stakes? Does it make them feel good or twee? Is it for the positive vibes of something anti-dark? For me, I find it kind of forgettable and wonder what is the point — even when these stories often try to make a point about today’s society in a kind of transparent and preachy way. There’s rarely enough story to truly express those themes gradually. In the case of Automatic Noodle, the story was OK. The characters were relatively likeable, and they fit well with certain stereotypes (though why did the audiobook narrator give one of the characters the voice of someone with a stuffy nose, I’ll never know). I feel like it was worth the read only because it was so short (so why be so petty as to ask for my 4 hours back?), but I think I could have skipped it just the same. Nevertheless, it did give me a bit of a craving for hand-pulled noodles. Marketing wins again!

2.5 stars

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