In Annalee Newitz’s new novella Automatic Noodle, four resourceful robots open their own noodle shop in 2060s San Francisco, after California secedes from the United States. In the book’s Bay Area, human-equivalent embodied intelligences (or HEEI) have been granted civil rights by the nascent Californian government, albeit with less muscular liberties than those of their fleshy neighbors.
The book is rich with futuristic trappings, such as sentient contracts who live on the blockchain, but it is Newitz’s skewering of the contemporary that makes Automatic Noodle so delicious. Delivery apps, ghost kitchens, and society-steamrolling tech monopolies are all teased to extremes, not unlike the biang biang noodles served by the book’s cast of robo-restaurateurs.
CHIRB recently caught up with Newitz, whose bibliography encompasses both sci-fi (The Terraformers, The Future of Another Timeline) and historical nonfiction (Stories are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and The American Mind), to discuss matters both automated and noodly. Newitz is also an editor of the upcoming sci-fi anthology We Will Rise Again, coming out December 2, 2025, from Simon & Schuster/Saga Press.
(Note: This interview has been edited for clarity, and the interviewer worked with Newitz at the Gawker Media sci-fi site io9 over a decade ago, prior to Hulk Hogan suing Gawker into oblivion with the help of Peter Thiel.)
Cyriaque Lamar
In Automatic Noodle, you’ve assembled an HEEI crew. There’s Hands (the chef), Cayenne (the business bot), Staybehind (the interior decorator), and Sweetie (front of house). What was the genesis of the gang?
Annalee Newitz
I had written a couple columns for New Scientist about new ways that people were imagining building robots. And one of the things that drives me nuts is whenever you see representations of robots in the future, it’s always The Terminator basically, with the exception of Interstellar, which has that cool robot [TARS] that’s kind of like Hands. I wanted to have a robot of just arms, because those are actually real.
I knew I wanted a soft robot. Soft robots are a big thing right now, and I think they’re going to be more and more common. So, Cayenne is a squishy robot that’s like an octopus.
Two semi-humanoid robots round out the mix. I wanted a soldier robot, that’s how we got Staybehind, and I definitely wanted a customer service robot, which is Sweetie. I can’t imagine a more horrifying fate as a robot than being nailed down at a customer service kiosk [like Sweetie], and they’ve made you look like a cute white lady on top, and then on the bottom, they’re like, “Fuck it, have three legs with roller skates on them.” She’s stuck there all night long, and people piss on her kiosk.
I was trying to imagine the kinds of robots we might actually have booping around in the world. They’re all enslaved, and then they’re all liberated, so their indenture brings them together.
Cyriaque Lamar
I really enjoyed that Sweetie gets a makeover chapter.
Annalee Newitz
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.”
Cyriaque Lamar
Throughout the book, we see imperfections in machine knowledge. There are robots of “puppy grade” intelligence, and revenge-obsessed bots who operate outside of a utilitarian framework. What was the inspiration there?
Annalee Newitz
I’m here in San Francisco, surrounded by AI believers. You can’t walk three feet without somebody talking about how AI is going to destroy the world or be the new religion. And one of the things that these AI zealots really believe is gradations of intelligence. They think of intelligence as a commodity, something that can be quantified, bought, and sold, which is already wrong, because we don’t know what the fuck intelligence is. It’s very Brave New World, and very eugenics-oriented, too.
[Given this,] I thought you’d have people developing AI with the express intent of it being “puppy grade,” like, “Oh, we only need it to be a dog. We don’t need it to have advanced consciousness.” This is actually a thing that I obsess about in a lot of my writing. I’m kind of obsessed with the idea of what it means to be told that you are intellectually defective, and how that affects your life, self-regard, and prospects. It’s also a personal tic, something that probably you and many other people in the culture industry have. We’re all like, “Am I smart enough? Am I getting paid enough for my brain?”
Cyriaque Lamar
Another big theme is the tech industry’s dereliction of responsibility, and how corporate actors with unchallenged socioeconomic authority can destroy lives, leaving their victims no recourse. You really run with that.
Annalee Newitz
Like a lot of urbanites, I’ve used GrubHub more than I should. I was thinking about how algorithmically shaped GrubHub is, and how it surfaces certain restaurants. A restaurant lives or dies by [these metrics], so I wanted to capture this sense that you can be destroyed by anonymous reviewers, and it’s not like the olden days of the internet, where you’d be mobbed with people just being mean to you. Now, they’re not only mean, they’re putting you out of business.
I wanted to include review bombing as a major plot driver because I think that people don’t fully appreciate how much review bombing resembles actual bombing, in the sense that it’s just an indiscriminate attack: stochastic terrorism, basically. It’s not as violent as bombing someone literally, of course, but it can destroy people’s livelihoods and end their lives.
Cyriaque Lamar
Digital world, material consequences.
Annalee Newitz
There’s a very small subplot in the book about how the United States has turned into a giant crypto scam. People will do a crypto scam [in California], and then flee to the U.S. because crypto scamming is legal there. I had no idea how prescient I was. Stablecoin legislation is actually setting up the conditions for just that kind of bullshit.
Cyriaque Lamar
You’ve been a San Francisco resident for years. What informed the 2060s San Francisco of Automatic Noodle?
Annalee Newitz
The book is about the parts of San Francisco that I found to be welcoming and healing. I know that sounds a little cheesy, but a lot of people have arrived in the city because they’ve been forcibly expelled from their families, communities, or countries.
When I came to the city, I felt like I really found a home where I can be as weird as I want, and there’s always somebody twelve times weirder than me. It’s just a perfect town for weirdos, and, at its best, a blend of underground artist vibes with high-tech and scientific experimentation. It’s an odd combination that you almost never see, where people are true believers in science, but also are like, “Let’s have an orgy and take ayahuasca, and then tomorrow go back to doing drug discovery, or writing open source software.”
But over the past decade, San Francisco has undergone a dramatic transformation. A lot of the utopian futurist ideas and vibes have been captured by right-wingers, by network state people like Balaji [Srinivasan], or Curtis Yarvin, and his vision of despotic utopia.
It’s such a weird thing, because [in Automatic Noodle] I bomb the city in order to save the city. In real life, I wouldn’t want to bomb San Francisco, and I’m not a big believer in violence as a solution, but I think there’s something super cathartic for me to say, “All right, the city is rebooting.” And when you reboot a place, only the people who really love it are going to be here.
I set Automatic Noodle after the [Californian-American] war because I didn’t really want to hurt the city; I wanted to heal the city. I wanted to focus on the healing, where we get to eat noodles again and get laid, stuff like that.
Cyriaque Lamar
The thing that always strikes me about tech feudalism is that its proponents seem impervious to the suggestion that it degrades everyone’s quality of life.
Annalee Newitz
I think it’s that these are people who are already miserable. Elon Musk is like, “I have to take [a bunch] of drugs to feel like a normal guy.” Maybe try something else?
Cyriaque Lamar
Build a giant laser tag arena instead.
Annalee Newitz
Or just like, go retire, man.
Cyriaque Lamar
The older I get, the more I realize “The Things That Dreams Are Made Of” by The Human League is one of the cleanest blueprints for a happy life.
Annalee Newitz
So true, yes!
Cyriaque Lamar
You put a lot of worldbuilding into your future San Francisco. Is this a setting you’d think of revisiting?
Annalee Newitz
Obviously, never say never. But I am halfway through my next novel, and it has a similar tone, but the plot and characters are very different.
Cyriaque Lamar
Throughout Automatic Noodle, the characters consistently question the very concept of “authenticity.” I found this pretty relevant, given our modern era of deepfakes, social media sock puppets, and so on.
Annalee Newitz
One of the big themes is that these characters would rather be “automatic” than “authentic,” because “authenticity” is a term that’s being weaponized against them: to undermine their ability to do their jobs, their ability to live in the world.
When I was writing the book, I was talking to friends of mine who do food writing and think about these things in a much more profound way. I talked to Michi Trota, who’s an awesome sci-fi writer. She’s a chef, and she’s Filipino, and she cooks stuff that’s labeled “authentic.” She was the person who said, “I hate the word authenticity!” which I then later put in the mouth of one of my characters, with her permission.
The reason that she hates that term is because it’s this label that people from a dominant culture, like white people, put onto food or other products created by a marginalized or fetishized group. It’s a way of just exotifying food and cultures, and turning them into the other.
Saying something is “authentic” is like saying, “Oh, this isn’t part of the real food aisle. Put that into the ethnic food aisle.” But it’s also a way of freezing culture in place, a way of saying culture doesn’t ever change, and denying that culture is a living thing. If biang biang noodles are made in San Francisco, they’re not going to be the same as if you got them in northern China, but they could be just as wonderful, and they’re authentic to what they are. They’re authentic to being “San Francisco,” or, in this case, “Asian-Californian robot.”
That’s a complicated way of saying that the term “authenticity” is very toxic, and it’s also a gatekeeping tool. I grew up in the era of indie rock being all about “authenticity,” and that idea was also very gatekeepy. Like, only certain people were allowed to make this “authentic” music, and if you did certain things, you couldn’t be part of the “authentic” group. And I just fucking hate it! I wanted to tell a story about a group of people who basically could never be “authentic,” no matter what they did, so they had to build something.
Cyriaque Lamar
There’s plenty to make one cynical about technology nowadays. What’s got you optimistic?
Annalee Newitz
I’m getting a lot of optimism from the fact that people are starting so many new publications, like Coyote, which has gotten a huge boost from a recent fundraising campaign. And there’s Defector, 404 Media, and Flaming Hydra. I think that every kind of transformation of a social network, like Twitter going into X, leads to a diaspora of people going to new places and building new stuff. And I think that people haven’t stopped using social media for good stuff, it’s just that they’re in transit to other places.
I also visit robotics labs when I can. There are a lot of people working in robotics, especially things like soft robots, who are thinking about integrating robots into our lives in a way that’s not based on this myth of robot overlords or AI super-intelligence. They’re actually like, “Oh, these are going to be helpful tools for elder care, people who have disabilities, search and rescue, or environmental remediation.” One of the big uses for soft robots is that they can go through multiple environments and gather environmental data.
I feel like there’s this whole side of technology that’s perhaps boring for science fiction because it isn’t about waging a giant war, or stepping on people’s skulls with your metal foot—which I love—but there’s also this other story to be told. Like, what if robots were just your neighbors and regular folks, and they weren’t super masterminds who turned you into a paper clip? What if they just were, like, coming over to borrow a paper clip? What if they were just trying their best, like all of us?
FICTION
By Annalee Newitz
Tordotcom
Published August 05, 2025
