
Member Reviews

CW: war (in the past), xenophobia
I really enjoyed this little book! A cosy story about robots that open a noodle shop, it has all the cosy vibes I love: found family, food, going up against the odds and beating them!
While this is a cosy story, it also discusses some pretty heavy topics. It’s taking place in 2065 (iirc), just a bit post war, where California has gained its independence from America. It’s interesting to see the parallels to what we’re currently seeing in the US in terms of attitudes towards “others”, and how that was a catalyst to California fighting for its independence. There are discussions of losing friends and loved ones, as well as PTSD, and the idea of people who are “illegal”.
I really loved how the small gang of robots (and one human) were able to use creativity to beat the xenophobes (robophobes, in the book) who were trying to shut down their little noodle shop. Overall, this is a story of love winning against hate and that haters are really brave when they’re sitting behind a screen, but it’s the people who actually show up that really matter.

The first thing that drew me to this book was the title: Automatic Noodle. What is an automatic noodle? It sounds so whimsical and fun, and we all need more whimsy in our lives. I love me some good whimsy.
I also thought that this cover was so fun, I loved the interesting art, art style and the coloring! Give me whimsical covers too!
This story follows a group of robots who open up their own noodle shop. And it just so happens to be located in the San Francisco area, since I am also from that area, I thought that was cool! You don't find many stories that take place in California, especially not the Bay Area.
I did find it a bit slow at times, but it is a chill story, so I should've expected that.
I think this is perfect for fans of Psalms for the Wild-Built. It has a very similar tone, vibe and general message. It's fun, vivid, but it also makes you think. This was also really short, only a four hour long audiobook!
Thanks to NetGalley for the audiobook ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review! My Goodreads review is up and my TikTok (Zoe_Lipman) review will be up at the end of the month with my monthly reading wrap-up.

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz is a yummy delight.
4.5 Stars
Post-war San Francisco, a robot and an AI-run noodle shop, and a mystery as rich and delicious as the broth simmering and hand-pulled noodles in the back. This book is a delight, with a dash of dystopia and a heaping spoonful of heart...found family vibes for days.
This quirky novella has all the flavor of a late-night noodle binge and the emotional depth of finding family in the most unexpected places. In a city recovering from collapse, where culture clings to the edges and memory is a luxury, this group of robots is simply trying to do what they love: serve the masses delicious food, dodge trouble, and perhaps forge their path into the future.
As always, they hooked me with the promise of found family. I'm a sucker for it.
Themes:
🍜 Post-Apocalyptic Food Culture
🤖 Robot & AI Besties
🏙️ Rebuilding After War
💾 Memory as Commodity
🧠 Sentient AI Learning to Feel
🫶 Found Family
👩🍳 Culinary Noir
Narration: Excellent narration by Em Grosland, absolutely loved it.
Would I recommend this book?
A resounding YES. Especially if you love a little futurism with your comfort food, let this novella take you on a quick journey. It’s short, stylish, and surprisingly moving. You’ll be grinning one moment and questioning your ethics the next. And yes, you will crave noodles the whole time. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Thank you to Tor.com, Macmillan Audio, and NetGalley for allowing me to enjoy and review this ALC.

So many people are trying to do cozy sci-fi right now and I keep reading the books so i can find perfect ones like this. I loved this story so much -- the bots have been left behind and they have to justify their existence, so they decide to have a noodle shop. They need a human and find someone to be a figurehead. I found myself caring more for these bots than so many human characters -- this story is so funny and smart and well done. I'm going to be recommending this to everyone because I love it so much.

I really thought I was picking up a cozy, quirky dystopian story about robots running a noodle shop—something kind of weird and fun, like Dungeon Crawler Carl but in a sci-fi, non-LitRPG way. What I got instead was a novella that felt more like a political manifesto than a character-driven story.
The worldbuilding is creative and the concept had so much potential—robots with personalities, found family vibes, cooking and identity—but the social commentary was so heavy-handed, it often drowned out the actual plot. I prefer stories where the themes are woven in naturally, not where they are the story.
Cool idea, but it just didn’t hit the way I hoped.
⭐️⭐️ (2/5)
Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for an Advanced Listener's Copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

This novella checks three of my cozy boxes — food/cooking, healing and found family — but with robots! In future San Francisco robots employed at a restaurant discover that their operator has been MIA for months. What can they do to prevent their team from having to leave to other (less desirable) gigs? I was a bit worried since I did not love Newitz’s The Terraformers, but this felt very different to me. While integrating rich worldbuilding and incorporating current societal issues through the guise of sentient and (eh, mostly) autonomous robots, at the forefront Newitz weaves a cozy story with noodles and finding joy and peace. My main quibble was just that the book’s close felt very abrupt and I wanted something a little bit more that felt like closure. Minor quibble was that my favorite thing about food SFF is when the author really can make you smell, taste, and hunger for the food (I just only got that a little here). Regardless of that, I really enjoyed this book/audiobook and I think this one will have mass appeal.

This cozy sci-fi novella is exactly that - cozy!
The characters have such life and the audiobook narrator does a great job of distinguishing each characters voice and personality
In a post apocolyptic world a scrappy group of bots (and one human accomplish) start their own restaurant - it’s feel good and emotional in a fantastic way.

This one was so good. I needed something that left me feeling a little hopeful and this definitely hit the spot. The audio narration was wonderfully done. It’s an easy cozy read and I’m definitely going to reread this one sometime. I’m going to be checking out more of this author’s work.

This was a cute short story about robots operating a noodle restaurant. The narrator did a great job with the different voices and inflections. The story itself seemed a little too on the nose for me but all in all it was a fun listen!

3.5 stars!
This was cute. I know this is about the 20th time I've been underwhelmed by a cozy book but looking at the beautiful cover, can you really blame me?
In a near future San Francisco, a team of robots decide to rebuild a restaurant together despite the numerous challenges that robots face in terms of their rights being limited and everyday bigotry.
The setting is one of the most memorable parts of this book. In this world, California fought a war to secede from the rest of the United States, presumably possessing more progressive values than the rest of the increasingly fascistic country. As a Californian, I have a lot of feelings about California being uniform or even significantly more progressive then the rest of the country but I know I'm not supposed to be taking all this that seriously. Interestingly, robots have more rights in California but there's also a significant number of people against them taking jobs from humans. I think this is generally supposed to be an allegorical representation of the experience of immigrants in the US as well as queer people since there is some "corrupting the children" rhetoric being thrown around. That's all well and good but within the context of the novel it puts the reader in kind of a weird spot, because you want to root for the immigrants and queer people that the robots represent but also I think a lot of people (myself included) are deeply against robots taking human jobs, especially following the proliferation of AI tools. I'm overthinking this, I know.
Anyway, the actual story is very nice and the narrator did great. I like the characters and I think the choice to depict a robot with something close to PTSD was interesting because PTSD is at its heart a failure of memory (specifically a failure of forgetting and consistent storage) and it kind of makes sense for a robot. I don't know what else to say about the content. It's the kind of book that is fun and heart-warming as long as you don't think about it too much, but I overthink everything.
Thanks to Annalee Newitz and Macmillan Audio for this ARC in exchange for my full, honest review!
Happy reading!

3.5. A comfy, low stakes, feel good time. I really enjoyed the hopefulness of this story, mixed with some actual anxieties and trauma. It wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. More growth and becoming a part of something bigger than yourself. A lot of good faith and community mixed with the fact that a very small number of people can easily ruin a good thing. That hate can take hold so fast and have larger consequences than just the emotion itself. It is a solid but not so subtle allegory for immigrant and queer communities. Which, I enjoyed, but it did make our robo cast feel almost too human in their experiences. I would definitely recommend this book. Especially to Sci-Fi and Cozy readers alike. The only reason I don't give it a 4 or higher is I wish it had gone deeper. It felt nice but more surface level. Some of the characters have deep issues that are too easily "solved" for my taste, and the "big bad" is dispatched of very easily with smaller consequences than I had hoped for. Overall, it's solid and a great palate cleanser if you've been reading darker stories. Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the Audio ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I love a cozy robot book. This was sweet and quirky and suxh a quick read to brighten up someone's day. The narrator was awesome with many different, distinct voices.

What if a bunch of adorable post-war robots that are not needed for combat anymore, open a restaurant with pulled noodles and a lot of heart?
What if they then get attacked by haters and face the threat of being unmade by the algorithm?
Yes, and what if they fight against that in their very own way?
This is the short, cozy story of Automatic Noodles.
And if you love the idea of all of the above, then this is the (audio-)book for you.
The audiobook is perfectly executed with a narrator that gives distinct and very adorable voices to all of them.
4/5 stars
Thank you @netgalley and @Macmillan.Audio for the eARC!
#AutomaticNoodle #Netgalley #Bookstagram

In the not too distant future, where California is an independent country, robots have fought hard for their rights of liberation. They can't marry or have a bank account, but they can work independently and choose their jobs. It's something. And the robot Hands dreams of not just working in a food shop but opening one that serves hand pulled noodles. But first, they need to work with their friends to secure the lease on the building their former owners have defaulted on, learn how to pull noodles, and create a restaurant that will thrive in an algorithmic world.
I normally stay away from anything labeled "cozy," but Annalee Newitz tackles complicated topics which makes the lower stakes of this one feel appropriate. The team of robots, Hands, Staysbehind, Sweetie, and Cayenne, and their human (on hand to hard reboot/power on if needed) Robles, is a found family working to the goal of creating, feeding, and placemaking. They use their cleverness and leverage the parameters of a digital world to function independently of the humans who once owned their contract and carve our true community where bots and humans can coexist meaningfully. It's funny, a little scary, and a lot wholesome.
At novella length, this is essentially perfect. The narrative arc is short, the characters are well-fleshed out, and the speculative fiction worldbuilding drives the plot. Much longer, and it could fall into the trap of many cozy books where the story stalls out. And you may have heard me say this before, but I think that writers should break away from the idea that cozy means opening a shop, but I ate up every moment of this one. It crosses some uncomfortable lines for people worried about the accelerated growth of AI, but for robot lovers, this book is a joy.
The audiobook is excellent, narrated by Em Grosland, but the print book has some lovely formatting as well. I recommend taking your favorite format approach to reading this one.

Annalee Newitz serves up something unexpectedly heartwarming in Automatic Noodle, a novella that proves comfort food and comfort reading can be one and the same. Set in a post-war San Francisco where California has seceded, this story follows reactivated kitchen robots who open their own noodle shop in the ruins of their former workplace.
What could have been a gimmicky premise becomes a tender meditation on community and finding purpose after trauma. The robots aren't just quirky characters; they're displaced beings carving out meaning in a world that no longer has room for them. Their struggle mirrors that of the homeless war veterans they serve, creating an unexpectedly poignant parallel about rebuilding after devastation.
Newitz's San Francisco feels authentically local, grounding the speculative elements in something recognizably real. When online review bombing threatens the robots' livelihood, the story touches on current anxieties about digital harassment and small business survival without heavy-handed messaging.
Automatic Noodle succeeds as both gentle science fiction and a story about the universal need for belonging. It's the kind of book that might surprise readers who don't typically reach for sci-fi, offering accessible themes wrapped in just enough speculation to feel fresh.

Another creative take from the talented Annalee Newitz! A robot is suddenly awakened after more than a month offline. He is in a fast food joint of questionable quality that is flooded and without power. He reactivates the other robots and partial-robots with whom he worked, and they devise a plan to resurrect the restaurant with themselves in charge. They can do this because they live in California, a land outside America that has its own, more progressive laws.
The novel is funny and touching at face value. It is also a sharp critique of 2025 America’s treatment of immigrants and the unwinding of both EPA and green energy initiatives. It satirizes crowd-sourced platforms that occasionally allow for review-bombing (ahem), this time for restaurants and take-out food. Highly entertaining with good narration. Well recommended!
My thanks to the author, publisher, @MacmillanAudio, and #NetGalley for early access to the audiobook for review purposes. Publication date: 5 August 2025.

What a cozy balm of a book with just enough quirk and gumption to leave me feeling hopeful.
Imagine looking at your favorite coworkers and deciding to open your dream of a business together, supporting each other’s skills and strengths and growing together.
This near future novella delivers just that while paying homage to San Francisco (and giving hope to robots)
I had such fun with this and enjoyed everything about the production!

4.5 stars rounded up
A cozy sci-fi novella about found family and sentient robots opening a noodle shop in San Francisco! This was charming on its surface, but it's also using the othering of robots in this futuristic world as a metaphor for the treatment of people based on gender, sexuality, and immigration status. It feels like a hopeful and timely story about noodles that sound absolutely delicious! I really enjoyed it and I think it's smartly done. The audio narration is great as well. I received an audio review copy via NetGalley, all opinions are my own.

Thank you to NetGally and MacMillian audio for an audiobook arc of this title in exchange for an honest review.
Like a lot of people I was super hype for this title based on the premise and the adorable cover. Cozy sci fi is a hugely underrated genre and I’d give anything for there to be more titles. This one didn’t hit all the marks for me but was generally enjoyable.
What worked:
This was an excellent story for a novella. Super unique and not too complicated. This is a thin veiled representation of the real world issues a lot of people are currently facing and I think they’re handled well.
I got an audiobook arc and the audiobook is super short at 4 hours. The narrator does a really great job mimicking a robotic voice (and multiple on top of that) so I was really impressed. One caveat though is the monotone voice does make it a little easy zone out (dont mean to contradict myself still super talented just something to think about if you have a short attention span like me)
What didn’t work for me:
I think often the word cozy gets defined as low plot. It’s still a book that the point is to entertain me. Cozy is basically just like feel good and low stakes which this definitely is but I felt the story could be a little more robust.
Would recommend this book and definitely the audiobook, could likely finish it in one go.

Thank you so much to Macmillan audio for my copy of Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz Narrated by Em Grosland in exchange for an honest review. It published August 5, 2025.
The narration was very well-done in this book.
I found this book to have a very interesting premise, and it reminded me of books like Sourdough by Robin Sloan, and Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel. Even if you aren’t a sci-fi or dystopian reader, you might enjoy this one.