Paperback edition. From sci-fi visionary and acclaimed author Annalee Newitz comes Automatic Noodle , a cozy near-future novella about a crew of leftover robots opening their very own restaurant. You don’t have to eat food to know the way to a city’s heart is through its stomach. So when a group of deactivated robots come back online in an abandoned ghost kitchen, they decide to make their own way doing what they making food—the tastiest hand-pulled noodles around—for the humans of San Francisco, who are recovering from a devastating war. But when their robot-run business starts causing a stir, a targeted wave of one-star reviews threatens to boil over into a crisis. To keep their doors open, they’ll have to call on their customers, their community, and each other—and find a way to survive and thrive in a world that wasn’t built for them.
Annalee Newitz is an American journalist who covers the cultural impact of science and technology. They received a PhD in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley, and in 1997 published the widely cited book, White Trash: Race and Class in America. From 2004–2005 they were a policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They write for many periodicals from 'Popular Science' to 'Wired,' and from 1999 to 2008 wrote a syndicated weekly column called 'Techsploitation.' They co-founded 'other' magazine in 2002, which was published triannually until 2007. Since 2008, they are editor-in-chief of 'io9,' a Gawker-owned science fiction blog, which was named in 2010 by The Times as one of the top science blogs on the internet.