Book No. 36 of 2025
Who knew that cozy food-centric dystopian sci-fi could be a thing? In These Times you’d think that a near-future story where California has gone to war with the United States and some of its major cities have been leveled would be too close to home to enjoy, but this little novella manages to find a weird sort of joy in the bleakness. I was delighted—delighted!—by the extreme SF-Bay-Area-centricness of Automatic Noodle; maybe my favorite little detail is the use of “Nortons” as regional currency in San Francisco. (A reference, of course, to Emperor Norton.)
Automatic Noodle is a light, fizzy little yay-underdogs story that is impressive in its speculative world-building; the question of ethics around robot humanity is a fascinating one that is explored via backstory and subtext, and it is too, too real that the sans-California United States would have entirely different (and slavery-enabling) socio-political attitudes than the Best State.
And of course we haven’t even gotten to the noodles: this book is a sneaky little love letter to chewy, hand-slammed noodles. Obviously it made me want to either 1) jump in a time machine and go to my family’s favorite handmade noodle place in the Bay which has been closed for over a decade, or 2) jump on a plane to NYC and make a beeline to Xi’an Famous Foods.