Annalee Newitz: Automatic Noodle

Automatic Noodle – Annalee Newitz – Tordotcom – 9781250357465 – Hardcover – 176 pages – August 5, 2025 – $24.99 – ebook versions available at lower prices

Annalee Newitz is one of the best and most original science fiction writers I have read in a long time. I read their last novel, The Future of Another Timeline (it’s brilliant!) and couldn’t wait to read their next book. Automatic Noodle is simultaneously hilariously funny, sneakily political, and highly original. It’s pretty hard to resist and aside from the fact that it is a short book that leaves you wanting much more, it is one of my favorite books I have read in a long time. Newitz takes us into a future that is recognizable, and while it is as scary as any future looking book must be in our dystopian present, while positing that our future includes a bloody and destructive civil war, the book is somehow optmimistic and hopeful.

Automatic Noodle takes place in Annalee’s favorite city, San Francisco, in the near enough future that it is a recognizable place. California has fought a bloody, destructive, technologically advanced civil war to free itself from the United States. In its newfound freedom, robots have limited rights and must struggle to find their way in a new society. If that sounds eerily reminiscent of the 1870s, it’s not accidental. Annalee weaves together a set of wonderfully humane characters, all of whom are seeking to build new identities in a strange new world. It’s a wonderful story that makes you think and also feel. Great fun carrying along some really important ideas about humanity and freedom.

I really enjoyed talking to Annalee and hope you will not only enjoy our conversation, but go out and buy the book at once – then let me know if you like it as much as I do.

Annalee Newitz writes science fiction and nonfiction. They are the nationally bestselling author of the books Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age and Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, as well as the novels The Terraformers, The Future of Another Timeline (winner of the Sidewise Award), and Autonomous (winner of a Lambda Literary Award). As a science journalist, they are a writer for the New York Times and have a monthly column in New Scientist. They have published in The Washington Post, Slate, Popular Science, Ars Technica, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among others. They are also the co-host of the three-time Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

“This is a story—about building community despite adversity, fighting for your rights and individuality, and creating art that you want to see in the world—that I didn’t know I needed right now. And it was so much fun to read!”—Martha Wells, author of The Murderbot Diaries and Witch King

Author website.

Buy the book.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Oliver Radclyffe: Frighten the Horse (A Memoir)

Frighten the Horses – Oliver Radclyffe – Roxane Gay Books – 978-0-8021-6315-8 – Hardcover – 352 pages – $28.00 – September 17, 2024 – ebook versions available at lower prices

This is flat out a remarkable story told by a remarkable person. We live in a time when people are so often simply categorized into identities, as if the naming of a version of self somehow explains who a person is. Labels do not tell stories: gay, straight, queer, trans. All are too reductive to have any meaning whatsoever. Every person is a complicated being, and most of us contain multiple versions of ourselves. Sometimes those versions simply do not make sense.

Oliver Radclyffe started out life as a relatively protected and very privileged girl in England, who married a man and had four children, moved to a wealthy Connecticut suburb and had what seemed to be a perfect life. But his inner life was far from resolved and the tensions of an emerging self could not be reconciled until he eventually came out as a lesbian, risking a great deal in order to establish an identity that reflected his inner being.

But that turned out to be a way station on his ultimate journey. There was still more work he had to do before his ultimate transformation to being a man, one who is also an active parent, still learning from his children, still in the process of becoming. As we all should be.

Aside from this being an incredibly engaging story that takes place in the same town I grew up in, the courageously deep and honest sharing of his story was for me a journey toward understanding, both for the writer and for me, the reader. By exposing so much of his story and his struggles to become himself, Oliver has created what is truly an essential guide to understanding the trans experience. Even for the many of us who believe in the multitude of human identity and being need to understand as fully as possible what it actually means to be a trans person. If you are fortunate enough to have a trans person in your life, this book should be the next book you pick up.

While I am certain that every person’s story is unique and that Oliver is not a stand in for every gay or trans person, female or male, knowing so much about his ongoing journey to becoming his authentic self is incredibly valuable for others, whether we are ourselves gay, straight, trans or something else.

I can’t recommend this book enough. Go read it right now. Let me know what you think of it.

This review blurb says it all for me: “The finest literary telling of the experience of gender transition that I’ve ever read. It’s a terrific, expansive story because the focus of this warm-hearted man always returns to his children. He’s simply a wonderful parent, and that’s what keeps the reader turning the pages.”—Kate Bornstein, author of Gender Outlaw

Author website
Buy the book

Author photo by Lev Rose Water

Podcast: Play in new window | Download