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Armed at the end of the 20th century with her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from UC Berkeley, Annalee Newitz’s first book Pretend We're Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture analyzed American literature and dystopian movies. But as a vibrant young socialist in San Francisco, they had no need for dystopian bringdowns, being surrounded by intellectual friends, lovers, good food and multiethnic entertainments. A sparkling career in technology & science journalism, plus writing a shelfsworth of significant books, beckoned.

Like California activist/cultural critic Chris Carlsson (and many 19th century savants), the author occasionally works in fiction as well as nonfiction. Newitz’s novel Future of Another Timeline, which followed their science fiction debut Autonomous, time-traveled between a 1980s southern California suburb (where the execution of a teenage date-rapist, albeit just, was passed over breezily), primordial prehistory, and the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where Little Egypt and erotic female entertainers battle the intolerant rules maker Comstock and his minions.

Automatic Noodle is set in a time of robotic & biotech combos. Some robots are no longer physical entities but sentient software Duke University’s James Boyle uses his book’s title The Line as a metaphor for the legal distinction between persons, with legal rights, and nonpersons who do not. “This century our society will have to face the question of the personality of technologically created artificial entities. We will have to redraw, or defend, the line.” In Automatic Noodle these sentient robots who are HEEI—Human-Equivalent Embodied Intelligences—are acknowledged as citizens in California, though second-class and with limited rights. Different tools can mean a different life and its human interactions. New tools may rejigger political machines.

San Francisco has a remaining population of about 50,000. The City is now making do, finding its way, keeping what’s always been good while adapting to postwar damage and circumstances. Whereas Carlsson’s novels envision San Francisco’s natural springs resulting in canals, Newitz foresees a population adapting to busy river traffic during Market Street’s seasonal flows. The US bombed Silicon Valley in 2057.

Sadly, it’s logical for the malign force in the story to be the USA; now-independent California is where the best democratic values of any era are in practice, though Californian secession has been a trope used by both the right and the left in my lifetime. The US reconstitutes as a militarized crypto corporation, a frightening idea which Newitz might have overheard actually being discussed in some café, for AI visions now color the air of the techie San Francisco Bay Area like forest fires’ orange smoke did in 2020.

Working in a corporate faux-food franchise that appears to have been abandoned, the robots decide to take it over, set it up as a new business entity with a new name and menu limited just to biang biang noodles.

The novel’s characters are a Musicians of Bremen- or X-Men-like team of distinct personalities, implied genders and affections and affinities. These robots had all been designed for military roles in the war with the United States that brought California its hard-won independence, with various capabilities. Some have a heightened sense of smell and taste (originally for reconnaissance and then industrial uses) that appreciates human cuisine at its finest. Some see restaurant work as a way to pay off debts that limit their agency and choices. Cayenne is warm and empathetic, in an octopus-like body, and Hands is the melancholy hardworking chef, essentially a pair of mechanical arms with a mission.

Sweetie is smart, assertive, businesslike. I think a rolling Elle Woods of “Legally Blonde”—underestimated since her upper half is designed to be conventionally pretty—on wheels. Sweetie expertly negotiates the contract, a subtle piece of AI code alive on the blockchain with its own desires to survive, for legal control of the restaurant building. Staybehind is a stalwart, loyal veteran now suffering guilt at not having saved his squadmates in the war, a handyman with a flair for decoration.

A human who seeks shelter in the restaurant, Robles is a former customer of its earlier reheated fast-food incarnation. He can serve as a human figurehead on the staff to reassure regulators and skeptics it’s not all robots running the place. Under pressure he stammered out what legally became the business ownership’s name: “I don’t know!” It seems Robles is sort of a mascot from “the other”, the world of humans, like Gunga Din or Tonto.

The first 80 pages are largely the nuts-and-bolts of setting up the restaurant, plus trips to observe Chinese human mentors in their restaurants across town. Now a spoiler alert, so skip this paragraph if you don’t want to hear the plot’s conflict and results. As social media remains ubiquitous, the restaurant suffers doxxing by haters preaching a twisted anti-machine conservatism, driving a restaurant’s algorithmic ratings drive down into online invisibility and failure. Yet prior to the hate campaign, the restaurant had built up a following of loyal local patrons for take-out or onsite dining. Though originally a slur, the robots are quite happy their restaurant becomes known as “Automatic Noodle” rather than the original dubious “Authentic Noodle.” Despite their blitzkrieg of bot reviews—likely originating in the simmeringly hostile US, not locally—anti-robot haters are finally outwitted, defeated, and delisted on social media in a taste of their own medicine to slink off into irrelevance and obscurity. Good riddance!

One can imagine Newitz being given advice to write robot characters as people, but with different physical properties and enabling capabilities. Some of the team are implicitly gendered, some not. Sweetie’s mastectomy as a painless five-minute process is something I know many who’ve endured it might wish for. Newitz told Cyrialique Lamar of the Chicago Review of Books “Yeah, I had top surgery a few years ago, and it was such a huge ordeal. I was like, ‘Let’s write a happy story about top surgery that’s super easy to go to.’” There’s intimacy, but sex (affecting a Mr. Spock voice) “not as we know it, Jim.” The robots’ cheerful interaction between themselves and most humans is a metaphor for an urban salad of mutually tolerant ethnic and sexual minorities in all their varieties. Their limited rights read uncomfortably like Domestic Partner status before LGBT people could marry, and the now increasingly cruel regulation of transpeople.

At first only offering take out or delivery by an intelligent car, the roborestauranteurs discover that a friendly sit-down restaurant is a welcome community space for all ages, from precarious youth to elderly women knowledgeably evaluating the biang biang noodles. Newitz may recall arguments 30 years ago in the Bad Subjects publishing collective they co-founded about whether online political discourse alone generated a community, or if community required a collective future-oriented goal like a publication, neighborhood mural, or sustainable restaurant. Distinct individuals here unite to serve humanity. In their case, tasty noodles!

I actually hesitated to reread Staybehind’s grueling military experience, for it evoked my sadness at the memory of several of my own students (and aged, haunted Vietnam vets) damaged into pain and unemployability by unnecessary overseas wars. Automatic Noodle has a consistent warmth unfelt in the brittle Future of Another Timeline, a genuine heart I never felt in space opera bombast or most cyberpunk. There’s evidently more post-Octavia Butler science fiction I should read, alongside more books by Annalee Newitz.