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Annalee Newtiz's latest is a bite-sized sci-fi story is a testament to the power of building and fostering community
Art can often be looked at as a mirror to the state of the world. Margaret Atwood famously wrote The Handmaid's Tale with a few self-imposed rules: "I would not put into this book anything that humankind had not already done, somewhere, sometime or for which it did not already have the tools," resulting in an iconic work of dystopian fiction that has only grown in relevance since its publication in 1985.
Plenty of other science fiction novels have gone with the "the real world, but let's extrapolate how it gets worse" model, ranging from Octavia Butler's classic novel Parable of the Sower to Omar El Akkad's American War to Christopher Brown's Rule of Capture, which explore how the seeds for a future with fewer freedoms and rights have already been planted and how the growing conditions are just right for them to bloom. These books are excellent warnings for the world that we could soon find ourselves in, and at times, there's a sense of inevitability that accompanies them. No matter what we do, some variation of these fictional worlds are coming.
But while these futures are plausible, will we inevitably slide into them? Annalee Newitz's latest book, Automatic Noodle, pushes back against this idea, showcasing a war-torn and dystopic future whilst also laying out a guiding principle for how to insulate against it: by building and fostering community.
This novella has a fun premise: a team of robots employed in a crappy San Francisco ghost kitchen (Staybehind, Cayenne, Sweetie, and Hands) are reactivated to find that their restaurant's absentee owners have fled, leaving the place in a sort of limbo. In Newitz's future, intelligent robots (known as HEEI – Human Equivalent Embodied Intelligence) have some rights, but they can also be bought and sold or put to work by their owners, something that this team isn't keen on: they owe debts and don't want to be repossessed or have their parts sold from under them.
They hatch a plan: they figure out how to reestablish a restaurant business for themselves, reasoning that if they make good food, they'll attract customers and earn enough money to keep themselves afloat and their creditors far away. They quickly settle on making hand-pulled hot oil biang biang noodles and work to figure out how to get the word out about their business.
They quickly discover two things: if you make a quality product, it will appeal to people and that there are bad actors out there who're looking to cause problems for a whole host of reasons.
Last year, Newitz wrote a fascinating book, Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, an examination of history, popular culture, politics, and technology to look at how we use stories to manipulate people through propaganda and influencer campaigns. While Newitz noted in a recent newsletter that it Automatic Noodle is something of a creative pallet cleanser, it's clear that the topic is still on their mind.
While they're figuring out their technique and ingredients and and even their name and marketing strategy, they run up against some online trolls who're intent on review bombing their store into digital oblivion, and the robots have to find ways to mitigate the threat and overcome their strategies. If Stories are Weapons looks at how people use information and memes and storytelling to manipulate people, Automatic Noodle almost serves as a coda: this is how you negate that threat.
The solution is deceptively simple: build a resilient community around you. The robots know they have a good product: their noodles keep selling out day after day. But they realize that people are lingering in the space; they want to know more about the robots and the storefront (the team is reluctant to come forward as a robot-fronted space, lest they run afoul of anti-robot people in real life) and they like the vibe of the place. The robots open their doors to other robots and community activities, are generous with kids who stop by without money, make their own merch for the store, and other steps that make their place an inviting, warm place to welcome in the neighborhood.
Andrew Liptak
This optimism runs through Newitz's work, particularly their last novel, The Terraformers, which followed the inhabitants of a planet being terraformed out from under them by a malevolent mega-corporation. Like in Automatic Noodle, the character's path forward comes down to mutual aid and support, building up a resilient community that allows them to weather the external actions that threaten to pull them apart. It's easy to isolate individuals, picking them off from the pack and whittling down the herd one by one.
At its heart, Automatic Noodle is a concise, focused story on that one point: divisions invite destruction, whether it's a neighborhood, online forum, or political movement. Creating connective tissue, bridges, and bonds across those factions makes destruction harder. That's a process that takes a considerable amount of time and energy to accomplish, and while we often look to big, grand actions that solve our problems, it's really the multitude of tiny, everyday decisions that gets us closer to building a better future.
It's incremental work, whether that's reaching out to a neighbor or setting up shop with the goal of serving one's home.