- The Good: Cute, cozy, and wholesome
- The Bad: Lacking tension, action, and plot
- The Literary: This cozy scifi/fantasy trend has been going strong since the pandemic
A group of food-service bots reboot in an abandoned ghost kitchen in a post-war 2064 San Francisco. After some negotiating amongst themselves, they decide to illegally open a neighborhood lunch spot, focusing on hand-pulled noodles.
This cozy scifi is exactly what it sounds like. A light, fun story about robots opening a restaurant. In this future, autonomous bot operations are strictly forbidden, but these four robots are ready to prove their worth without human oversight, so it’s easy to root for the underdog. The tactile descriptions and joy of making food is immersive and infectious, but honestly, that’s the best it has to offer for me.
I’m not excited about cozy scifi in the best of times, mostly because the stakes are so low that nothing really pays off or feels satisfying. I know that’s not the point, and I realize these stories aren’t exactly for me. The challenge is that the protagonists experience bad reviews for the restaurant — and then they overcome it with minimal effort.
But I also have a difficult time reading about robots who don’t think or behave like robots. These robots are sentient, experience love and hurt feelings and are genderfluid, which assumes they have a gender to begin with. The only reason this is classified as scifi is because of the robots, and the robots barely classify as robots.
I do appreciate that Newitz is attempting to compare fear of robots to the fear of immigrants, or really any other group that we as humans tend to label and simplify and apply bias. But it’s literal to the point of parody. So, really, not very much of this Hugo/Locus/Novella-nominated novella works for me.