Review: Automatic Noodle

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've noticed a recent trend of "cozy" books, which means a book emphasizing neither worldbuilding or plot, but focusing on characterization and lower-key, more personal stakes. This may not be the classic definition, but that's what it feels like to me. Becky Chambers belongs in this little sub-genre, for example, and of course there's Travis Baldree's breakout hit, Legends and Latees.

Having said that, I think it's pretty easy to write something mediocre in this little sub-genre, and a lot of the ones I've seen are just that: a comfort read to while away a few hours that starts fading from your mind the instant you close the back cover. Not that this is a bad thing, if you as the reader need the temporary distraction. But I think it's possible to write a cozy with a little more depth that is nevertheless a soothing, sweet story, and I think this book manages it.

It helps greatly that this is a novella with only 160 pages. There isn't room to take a deep dive into what seems like a second American Civil War, with California seceding (and one would think Oregon and Washington would follow suit, as well as New York, Massachusetts and other Northeastern states, but like I said, there isn't time to get into that). The causes of the war are also not delved into, although the implication is that it had something to do with the civil rights of robots--which are everywhere in this near-future. In fact, our four main characters, Staybehind, Sweetie, Hands and Cayenne, are robots. Staybehind is a burly, bipedal ex-war machine, Sweetie is a tripod-legged, human looking from the waist up android who is creepily decked out with blond hair and breasts, Cayenne is an eight-armed octopus form, and Hands is a meter-tall, vaguely Dalek-seeming round big-armed barrel. All these robots are working in a restaurant when the owners flee the city (San Francisco in the last days of the war) and shut down the establishment, including the robots who are their indentured servants. But six months later, a storm sweeps the neighborhood where the restaurant is located, and the building's flooding awakens Staybehind via his military protocols. (And it's odd that all four characters have gender, but apparently in this future, at least in California, robots are allowed to choose their gender.) Staybehind then reboots the other three, who band together first to survive, and then to reopen the restaurant and turn it into a noodle shop.

That's the entire plot, such as it is. The story is the four robots--and one homeless human they take in--coming together to make their restaurant succeed. The obstacles, such as they are, are humans on the so-called Vigilance Committee who don't think robots should be doing anything of the sort, and review-bomb the Authentic Noodle (as the restaurant is first named, although it gradually becomes known as the titular Automatic Noodle). There isn't another war to force California to rejoin the Union, or riots or further bombs going off--the city's remaining residents, both human and robot, are shown coming together to rebuild it. The Automatic Noodle slowly becomes an anchor point in the entire community, with equal focus on humans and robots:

It didn't take long before Lemon's bot sewing circle started meeting in the restaurant on Thursday night. All of them referred to the place as Automatic Noodle. Lemon's friends were generous with embroidery advice for Staybehind, and Cayenne was pleased to discover that they also donated whatever Nortons they could afford, in thanks to the restaurant for holding space. Next, Sweetie organized a Tuesday game night for bots, and Sloan [a sapient self-driving car] volunteered to curate a Saturday media night. He was especially keen on the old TV series Friends, which he insisted was the first show written entirely by LLM.

(That got a laugh-out-loud chuckle from me, by the way.)

None of this would work if it wasn't for the characterization. Staybehind is carrying around a traumatic memory from the last days of the war, and begins to move past it; Sweetie takes steps to remake her appearance into what she wants to look like, not the sexbot look her creators saddled her with; Hands attains his dream of becoming a master chef; and Cayenne, the financial guru of Automatic Noodle, makes real progress on paying off his indenture and attaining his independence. The four of them are also creating a found family and community, and the entire book is a love letter to that and making delicious food. (I had never heard of biang biang noodles before this, but they definitely sound like something to check out.)

All of which goes to show you can create a compelling story without much of a plot, if you do it right. I don't think this tale would work at novel length, but the novella format suits it perfectly. I wish I could find more cozys like this, as it might make me like the sub-genre more, but this one is one to check out.


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Review: Shroud

Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Adrian Tchaikovsky has written some of my favorite books in the past few years (particularly the Final Architecture trilogy), but this one is one of his best in terms of sheer alien weirdness. Most of this takes place on Shroud, a newly discovered, pitch-black, tidally locked moon with killer gravity and pressure and an atmosphere with no oxygen. But it, and the life inhabiting it, is screaming its electromagnetic head off into the void, and that is how the crew of the Concern (corporate) mining and exploitation ship the Garveneer find this inhabited moon and prepare to strip it of its resources. (This future post-bottleneck humanity, after leaving a poisoned Earth behind and expanding into the stars, is not a nice species, to say the least. They labor under extreme predatory capitalism, among other things.)

But Shroud and its native life, which is eventually revealed to be a single interlocking world-mind organism, is more than a match for the humans on board the Garveneer. The moon itself, even without its sapient species, is deadly and inimical to human life. Of course, after an accident on board the Garveneer, our two protagonists, Juna Ceelander and Mai St Etienne, are dropped onto the moon in an exploration pod, and have to survive a trek across the surface of Shroud, fighting the inhospitable environment and the supremely weird life and ecosystem every step of the way. This trek takes up most of the book. As this tale unfolds, even though Juna's first-person viewpoint starts the story, we begin to get chapters from the POV of the alien world-mind. As an alien being without eyes that senses the world through electromagnetism and echolocation, it does not at first even have a concept of human beings. It thinks the pod is a being, calling it the "Stranger." The Shroud-organism is very curious and wishes to study and learn, and it attaches itself to the pod (sometimes literally) and follows it as Juna and Mai steer it across Shroud, picking up different ways of thinking from what it is observing. This enables the Shroud world-mind to expand its own horizons and eventually win its fight with the resource-stripping humans (even though it does not comprehend that humans actually exist until the very end of the book). But it is not a vindictive being, and after Juna jury-rigs an electromagnetic brain scanner to broadcast her brain activity and returns to the surface of Shroud (since the moon and its life are shouting across the EM spectrum so loudly she cannot be heard otherwise), the world-mind realizes she is a separate being and communication begins.

I'm not a scientist or biologist, and the sheer breadth of hard SF concepts on display here is breathtaking. I cannot imagine the amount of research that went into this. It also requires a careful reading to understand what is going on, although I can tell the author tried to make it as accessible as possible. This of necessity slows down the pace, and I'm sure some people might complain about Juna and Mai creeping in a painfully slow fashion across the surface of Shroud through most of the book. But if you want to dive into an alien world that is unlike anything I've ever read before, pick this up. This book is not an easy read, but stick with it. You will be rewarded.

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Review: The Incandescent

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I've heard this book referred to as "anti-Hogwarts": that is, a magic boarding school tale told from the viewpoint of the teachers, not the students. There have been a spate of so-called "dark academia" books recently, including R.F. Kuang's fantastic Babel and Naomi Novik's more YA-oriented Scholomance trilogy. But again, these books all carry the viewpoints and concerns of the students. This book, on the other hand, consistently reflects the problems and concerns of the teachers. It also was obviously written by a teacher, and it overflows with the care and love a good teacher has for her students.

And she deserved it. She was brilliant. It was hard to quantify the difference between a merely very intelligent student and a brilliant one. It didn't show up in a list of exam results. Sometimes, in fact, brilliance could be a disadvantage--when all you needed to do was neatly jump through the hoop of an examiner's grading rubric without ever asking why. It was the teachers who knew, the teachers who felt the difference. A few times in your career, you would have the privilege of teaching someone truly remarkable; someone who was hard work to teach because they made you work harder, who asked you questions that had never occurred to you before, who stretched you to the very edge of your own abilities. If you were lucky--as Walden, this time, had been lucky--your remarkable student's chief interest was in your discipline: and then you could have the extraordinary, humbling experience of teaching a child whom you knew would one day totally surpass you.

I'm not necessarily fond of the hoary old adage write what you know, but in this case, by doing that, Emily Tesh knocks it out of the park. Of course, most teachers aren't required to teach magical students whose very existence and power attracts demons. But in this magical alternate history, these students exist, and the centuries-old boarding school Chetwood (and isn't that just the most British name?) is where our protagonist Sapphire Walden lives and works. She is the school's Director of Magic, and this deliberate, slowly unfolding story tackles the aforementioned brilliant students and the demons they attract.

This world's magic system isn't bright or flashy, and sometimes borders on the mundane--that is, until it doesn't. This creates an interesting tension throughout the book, the juxtaposition of Walden's regimented everyday life and the wild uncontrollable presence of the demons she must defend the school against:

School and not-school, private and public, and most importantly land and water; The places we belong, Walden might have said to a class, and the places we do not. Magic followed logical, consistent, learnable internal rules--until it did not; until you ran into the woolly edges where everything depended on the perceptions of the magician. It annoyed some students immensely. Walden had always found it delightful: beyond all the rules and systems so carefully worked out by so many scholars over so many centuries, at the boundaries of knowledge, a space full of beautiful mystery.

There are a few scenes of magical battle, but this is mostly a slow-burning character study of Saffy Walden. A rather clever way to tip us off to the main character's interior changes is how she is referred to in the story: for most of it, she insists on being called Doctor Walden or just Walden. It's only at the end, after her own hubris regarding her abilities has brought her down, that the name she is called on the page abruptly shifts: now, she is Saffy. A Saffy who feels humbled and vulnerable, and ready to embark on a serious relationship with the demon-hunting Marshal Laura Kenning.

This primary emphasis on character, and grown-up characters at that, does mean that this is not a fast-paced story. If you're looking for something slam-bang and sulfur-tinged, this is not that book. (I also appreciated the fact that like her first book, the Hugo-winning Some Desperate Glory, this is a stand-alone, complete story.) But if you want a book suffused with the love of teaching and learning, where Saffy's core of being a teacher is the story's main theme (as she puts it in a striking conversation with a higher-level demon, the Phoenix: "I am a teacher," Walden said at last. "This is what I do. And I choose to do it well."), you might want to pick this up.

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Review: A Drop of Corruption

A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book, the second in the series called Shadow of the Leviathan (at least for book #1, The Tainted Cup ) apparently has the publisher changing its mind and emphasizing the mystery aspects. The tag on this one reads, "An Ana and Din mystery."

Which is fine. I happen to prefer the worldbuilding and characterization end of the spectrum, and this book still excels at both. We find out more about the Empire of Khanum, built on substances derived from the highly mutagenic leviathans, monstrous kaiju from the sea who are simultaneously the enemy and heart of the Empire. We also have two layered, well-drawn characters, the investigator Ana and her assistant Din, and in particular, we find out more about who (and what) Ana really is. I suppose the mystery aspects have been brought to the fore because the mystery genre sells better than fantasy, and the mystery in this one is also well constructed. But make no mistake, the core of this series is its fascinating, oozing, horrifying world, and the trap the Empire has built for itself. It cannot survive without the leviathans--they are the entire basis for its economy and existence. At the same time, the sea monsters are growing ever larger and nastier, and the Empire is only barely managing to contain them.

I imagine this will come to a head in the third book, which I will snap up the instant it is released. (It also helps that these are beautiful books, which look quite lovely sitting on your bookshelf.) But this one takes a harder look at why Ana and Din do what they do, and their concept of justice:

"Oh no," she said, sighing. "I do not mean to mock you, Din. For I understand. Justice is not a terribly satisfying task, is it? The Engineer can see a bridge span a river, and marvel at what they made. The Legionnaire can look upon the carcass of a leviathan,and know they've saved countless lives. And the Apoth can watch a body mend and heal and change, and smile. But the Iudex...we are not granted such favors."

She leaned closer to the glass. "This work can never satisfy, Din, for it can never finish. The dead cannot be restored. Vice and bribery will never be totally banished from the cantons. And the drop of corruption that lies within every society shall always persist. The duty of the Iudex is not to boldly vanquish it but to manage it. We keep the stain from spreading, yes, but it is never gone. Yet this job is perhaps the most important in all the Iyalets, for without it, well...the Empire would come to look much like Yarrow, where the powerful and the cruel prevail without check. And tell me--does that realm look capable of fighting off a leviathan?"

This is very much the "middle book" of the series, setting things up for the finale. But it is still a satisfying book all on its own, and I cannot wait for the next.

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