Annalee Newitz
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- Columnist, New Scientist
- Freelance Writer, The New York Times
Eastern Region
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Articles by Annalee Newitz
Why Pronouns Matter in Science Fiction - Reactor
This is definitely the most niche brag you will read today: with the release of A Wall Is Also a Road, I will have a 5/5 score when it comes to publishing sci-fi books with nonbinary protagonists. No matter the topic of my books—time travel, robots running a noodle restaurant, far-future terraformers—I always include a nonbinary point of view. I do it for self-representation. Or self-preservation. Sometimes there is no difference.
The roots of AI fear in the West are cultural, not technological
Donald Trump declared that AI should now be called “super intelligence” In a year of increasingly wild rhetoric about AI in the US, perhaps the most memorable moment came last month, when President Donald Trump issued an executive order stating that the technology would no longer be known as “artificial”. Instead, it would be “super”.
Academia broke my heart
Some people with doctorates like to show the world what they’ve done. They write their names with “Ph.D.” as a suffix, or refer to themselves as “Dr. So-and-so.” I do not. Instead I call myself a recovering academic, because getting my Ph.D. was a form of intellectual trauma that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. I entered graduate school at the age of twenty, which means I was getting fucked up on Marx and Foucault when most of my peers were slamming shots.
My Kidnapped Clitoris
I had no idea the Senate had passed the Second Comstock Act until four of my most important primary sources disappeared from the life sciences library. My favorite librarian was working at the information desk that day. Zenobia’s fingertips were tattooed a deep crimson, and I liked to imagine it was because they were stained with the blood of her enemies. I straightened my tie and leaned against the desk. “Do you know where the Sterling Rosenberg visual history series has gone?
How I made a slime mould the protagonist of my new sci-fi novel
What if a slime mould was a graduate student? I never start writing a science fiction book without first asking scientists a lot of extremely strange questions. My next novel – A Wall Is Also a Road, which comes out on 6 October – was a particularly tough case. I decided that my main character would be a cellular slime mould who is also a graduate student. Why not? I certainly spent most of graduate school feeling like an amoeba.
Read an Excerpt From A Wall Is Also a Road by Annalee Newitz - Reactor
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from A Wall Is Also a Road, a new science fiction novel by Annalee Newitz, out from Tor Books on October 6th. Gardenpath is a graduate student. They also happen to be an amoeba–a slime mold, to be exact–from an ancient civilization that dwells in the space between the stars.
Le restaurant des robots rêveurs Annalee Newitz 2026
Dans un San Francisco en reconstruction, un groupe de robots oubliés se réveille, après un long sommeil, avec un rêve : ouvrir un restaurant de nouilles. Leur objectif : redonner vie à leur quartier. Mais quand le compte de leur établissement se retrouve noyé sous une pluie d'avis négatifs, l'existence de leur entreprise est menacée. Pour rester ouverts et faire face à un monde pas tout à fait pensé pour eux, ils devront en appeler à leurs amis, à leur communauté.
Feeding our books into generative AI risks creating a cultural void
Technology 9 hours ago Qwen3.8-27B runs frontier-class coding agents and reasoning locally, no cloud API required VentureBeat - Carl Franzen • 9h The biggest AI model release of the past few days, at least among the developers and AI power users on social media, wasn't a frontier cloud model from OpenAI, Anthropic or Google.
Feeding our books into generative AI risks creating a cultural void
‘We need human writing as much as we need technology’ … The Stuttgart City Library In 800 years, a group of students is sitting in a graduate seminar devoted to an era known as the Void Ages. They’ve read a couple of books and watched some of the two-dimensional, low-resolution media once called “movies”. A few students even assembled devices to experience “video games” – interactive stories devoted to accumulating digital representations of value – using the original controllers.
A WALL IS ALSO A ROAD
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy. Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006). A zombie apocalypse is one thing.
A Modest Proposal for Funding Transit Instead of AI
Transit drama always happens when I’m already late for something important, like an interview or a doctor’s appointment it took me months to book. We’ve all been there: The bus near my place in the city isn’t coming for half an hour, so I race down to BART, which takes me an additional 15 minutes. But when I reach the platform I discover that, for some infernal reason, the trains are delayed and I’m not going to make it to Oakland for at least an hour.
The ancient Silk Road city that has a lesson for Silicon Valley | New Scientist
How the Silk Road Spread Not Just Goods, But Myths of Dragons The Silk Road is one of the world’s most famous trade routes, connecting distant eastern civilizations with Eurasia. It stretched from China through …
🎧 Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz @annaleen.bsky.social #EmGrosland @macmillanaudio.bsky.social #LoveAudiobooks #KindleUnlimited #LibraryLove
Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz Narrator: Em Grosland Published by MacMillan Audio on August 5, 2025 Genres: Science Fiction Fantasy Length: 4 hours, 13 minutes Format: Audiobook Source: Library Goodreads Amazon, Audible, Libro.fm You don’t have to eat food to know the way to a city’s heart is through its stomach.
The Wave of the Present
We’re living in the future I’ll tell you how I know I read it in the paper fifteen years ago – John Prine 1. Billboards and billionaires solemnly inform us that we are “living in the future.” You can see the phrase in AI ads and business plans; you can read it in New York Times headlines.
Annalee Newitz (@annaleen.bsky.social)
This is a heavily interactive web application, and JavaScript is required. Simple HTML interfaces are possible, but that is not what this is. Post Annalee Newitz annaleen.bsky.social did:plc:qaqh5r6sxs62ykbzki4tcyad That's right, friends! STARLOG is back and I'm the editor-in-chief.
Technology is changing our perspective on nature – at every scale
Using a macro probe lens, Ariel Waldman filmed microbial mats in the desert valleys of Antarctica Ariel Waldman is standing all alone on a planet that looks a lot like Mars. At her feet are rock shards and barren soil. Overhead are jagged mountains streaked with dusty ice. The sky is a hazy white; the sun appears very far away. And then, Waldman smiles, explaining that she’s in Antarctica’s dry valleys, a vast stretch of deep-brown earth between frozen mountains and ancient glaciers.
An Interview with Boots Riley
Discover more from The Believer A quarterly literature, arts, and culture magazine. Over 5,000 subscribers Already have an account? Sign in by Annalee Newitz The following is excerpted from Annalee Newitz’s interview with Boots Riley in Issue 147 of The Believer. Illustration by Kristian Hammerstad. I dressed carefully for my interview with Boots Riley.
The Politics of ‘Pluribus’
Science fiction has become very anxious about the state of your mind at work. From Severance and The Substance, to Everything Everywhere All at Once and I Love Boosters, speculative storytelling is exploring identities ripped apart by labor, sometimes into horrifically mangled pieces. But Pluribus, created by Vince Gilligan (creator of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul), tackles this anxiety from a slightly different direction.
The future of robot armies is here – and it’s not what you think
1 day ago OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — After prevailing in its court fight with Elon Musk, OpenAI — the ChatGPT maker valued at $852 billion — remains on track for what could be one of the largest initial public offerings in history. Musk had been seeking the ouster of his fellow OpenAI co-founder, CEO Sam Altman, …
The future of robot armies is here – and it’s not what you think
Illustration of nanobots in the human bloodstream The robot army that saves the world won’t be anything like what you imagine. Nope, they aren’t little humanoids who can do synchronised martial arts like the ones who dazzled audiences during New Year’s festivities in China. And they won’t help you find a can of Coke with embarrassing slowness like the man-shaped beast known as Optimus from Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc.
Don Martin, MAD’s Sickest Artist
When I was a kid in the early 1980s, I supplemented my monthly MAD subscription by convincing my parents to buy me one of the many MAD paperbacks sold near the checkout counter at Fedco. My favorites were the ones by Don Martin, the chaotic cartoonist whose “One Fine Day” strips in the magazine never failed to hold my 10-year-old attention with their frenetic motion lines and impossibly grotesque body horror. I still have a significant number of his books from back in the day.
Automatic Noodle - kniha
While San Francisco rebuilds from the chaos of war, a group of food service bots in an abandoned ghost kitchen take over their own delivery app account. They rebrand as a neighborhood lunch spot and start producing some of the tastiest hand-pulled noodles in the city. But there’s just one problem. Someoneor somethingis review bombing the restaurant’s feedback page with fake “bad service” reports. Can the bots find the culprit before their ratings plummet and destroy everything they created?...
Social media is a defective product
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg exiting Los Angeles Superior Court in California I just sat down to write, but before committing words to my document, I took out my phone to check my calendar. Then I got a chat notification from a friend, who sent me a link to some meme on Instagram. Might as well check it out. Beneath the post are a bunch of short videos queued up, algorithmically chosen to enchant me: one is about ravens in the Tower of London, another about Indonesian street food. I poke the raven one.
Fuck the Roman Empire
On the west coast of the island of Sardinia, on a tiny finger of land that points south into the Gulf of Oristano, three civilizations once met in a pleasant seaside village called Tharros. None of them survived. Or perhaps all of them did, depending on how you look at it. The road to Tharros was paved by colonizers two thousand years ago, and today it is much the same. Italians flock here in summer; pleasant, grassy hills slope down to beaches full of families with picnic baskets and umbrellas.
Why it's high time we stopped anthropomorphising ants
Pollution is making many cities unlivable for their human inhabitants, but it is also tearing ant families and communities apart. Ants recognise each other by sniffing a thin layer of hydrocarbons on the outside of their exoskeletons; each colony has a specific “smell”. But a new study reveals that ozone emissions can change the structure of these hydrocarbons.
‘Heated Rivalry’ Gives Everyone Permission
Not since I discovered Star Trek: The Next Generation have I fallen as hard for a show as I did for gay hockey series Heated Rivalry. It’s not merely the show, however; it’s the glorious fandom, which amplifies and extends the latent meanings in the story, creating community around a sequence of fictional events.
The internet feels super lonely right now. Here's why
Why does it feel so lonely online these days? Right now, I’m glued to my phone. Like most people in the US, I get my news from various apps – social posts, podcasts, newsletters – and when things are blowing up (literally) I can’t look away. People in Minneapolis are posting video updates from protests; experts are publishing essays about international law and the US attack on Venezuela.
New library books
These works of science fiction are newly available through the Allen County Public Library. “There Is No Antimemetics Division” by Qntm An elite, secretive division battles invisible, memory-devouring entities that erase all evidence of their existence, forcing humanity to fight a war it can never remember.
How not to misread science fiction
Not so futuristic: Gandalf with a palantir in The Lord of the Rings We are approaching the Gregorian New Year, and it’s a great time to ponder what’s coming next. Are we about to use CRISPR to grow wings? Will we all be uploading our brains to the Amazon cloud? Should we wrap the sun in a Dyson sphere? If, like me, you are a nerd who loves science and engineering, sci-fi is the place you turn to imagine the answers.
Annalee Newitz on Robots, Identity, and “Automatic Noodle”
San Francisco–based Annalee Newitz is the nonbinary author of nine fiction and nonfiction books characterized by an expansive sense of possibility around science and culture. Two of their science fiction novels, Autonomous (2017) and The Terraformers (2023), and a couple of stories are set in a timeline in which robots with what Newitz calls “human-equivalent intelligence” have, to varying degrees, received civil rights.
Movies that Dictators Love
Donald Trump has proposed a lot of weird initiatives in his second term, but his revival of the Rush Hour movie franchise might be the weirdest. A few weeks ago, Paramount greenlit Rush Hour 4 at Trump’s request. The buddy cop series began in 1998 with Rush Hour, starring Chris Tucker as Detective Carter of the LAPD and Jackie Chan in his first major American role as Chief Inspector Lee of the Hong Kong Police Force.
This year we were drowning in a sea of slick, nonsensical AI slop
OpenAI founder Sam Altman is featured on Sora There is no doubt that 2025 will be remembered as the year of slop. A popular term for incorrect, weird and often downright ugly AI-generated content, slop has rotted nearly every platform on the internet. It’s rotting our minds, too. Enough slop has accumulated over the past few years that scientists can now measure its effects on people over time.
2025 Golden Poppy Awards Finalists
The California Independent Booksellers Alliance (CALIBA) presents the 2025 Golden Poppy Awards in recognition of the most distinguished books written and illustrated by creators who have made California their home. Committees for each category are made up of booksellers throughout the state tasked with developing a final ballot that will be voted upon by CALIBA's bookstore membership and their employees.
Automatic Noodle
. narr. by Em Grosland. Aug. 2025. 4:13 hrs. ISBN 9781250395627. $10.99. SCIENCE FICTION COPY ISBN While seeming like a 1980s animated movie for adults, Newitz’s cozy, futuristic sci-fi novella references today’s modern problems. In the 2060s, in a California that has seceded from the United States, robots named Stay Behind, Cayenne, Sweetie, and Hands are reactivated in an abandoned ghost kitchen in San Francisco, a city that is recovering from war and gives some autonomy to robots.
Is the future of education outside universities?
In 1907, US historian Henry Adams first started circulating a memoir that would go on to be a smash hit in 1919: The Education of Henry Adams. Given Adams’s illustrious family – both his grandfather and great-grandfather were presidents – you might expect it to be a self-congratulatory tale of the wonders of US education. Instead, it galvanised audiences with the bold claim that everything Adams had been taught in 19th-century schools was useless.
Automatic Noodle: Made me crave noodle soup in San Francisco
Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz After the human-owned company that bought them gets caught embezzling and flees the country, four plucky robots face hardships and obstacles as they try to open their own noodle shop in San Francisco. Annalee Newitz‘s brief novella, Automatic Noodle (2025) is brisk, cute and sweet, a literary descendant of Murderbot and all those 1940’s “Hey, my dad has a barn, let’s put on a show!” movies. It’s the late 2060s.
Yakkin’ About ‘The Wicker Man’
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Rise of the Review Bomb
In the fall of 2003 the presidential race was heating up, and a new wave of hacktivists was chipping away at incumbent George W. Bush’s online reputation all over the internet. Which is why, if you were to Google the phrase “miserable failure” around that time, Bush’s official White House biography would pop up in the top spot.
Where’s my jetpack got to? And other sci-fi tech queries
There is a game some people like to play when thinking about the future. Call it “Where’s my jetpack?” We pore over science fiction from years past (often the years when we were impressionable kids) and ask: “Why didn’t we get all the cool stuff we were promised?” Sure, we got videophones, pocket-sized computers and robots on Mars, not to mention genetically engineered bunnies that glow in the dark. But what about jetpacks? And flying cars? It is always something.
Automatic Noodle
Imagine a time when robots are nearly autonomous. In this futuristic sci-fi world, four robots team up to start their own restaurant making a special type of noodle. They all worked together before the war, under contract with a large corporation that opened a series of restaurants, each of which was short-lived. The robots were abandoned when the last restaurant went out of business, but while they were working, they learned valuable skills.
Summary and Reviews of Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz
TOILET POWER Sweetie watched water rush down 24th Street in the dark. She was preoccupied by the question of power. Robles' batteries weren't enough to get the restaurant up and running again, but his tunnel toilet had given an idea. Private chat: New business partners! 3 members: Sweetie, Cayenne, Hands Hey team! It's going to be raining like this for at least another week, which means we could pull power from the sewers. They have hydro turbines at the hardware store on Castro. Can you help?
Boek | Automatic Noodle - Annalee Newitz
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. Uitgeverij Van Ditmar Boekenimport B.V. Imprint Tor Publishing Group Uitgegeven als Hardcover • Paperback Eerste editie 05-08-2025 Laatste editie 18-08-2026 ISBN 9781250357465 • 9781250450982 Aantal pagina's 176 Serie Automatic Noodle Seriedeel 1 Taal Engels
Automatic Noodle de Annalee Newitz
While San Francisco rebuilds from the chaos of war, a group of food service bots in an abandoned ghost kitchen take over their own delivery app account. They rebrand as a neighborhood lunch spot and start producing some of the tastiest hand-pulled noodles in the city. But there’s just one problem. Someone?or something?is review bombing the restaurant’s feedback page with fake “bad service” reports. Can the bots find the culprit before their ratings plummet and destroy everything they created?
NEW SCIENTIST ⟩ Sotsiaalmeedia on surnud – mis tuleb edasi?
Teadus New Scientist Tellijale Sotsiaalmeedia probleemid kuhjuvad. Kuid peagi on meid ootamas selle asemel üks uus nähtus. Foto: tehisaru loodud pilt / Amore Seymour / Pixabay Üks 21. sajandi mittenaljakatest irooniatest on see, et kõik, mida pidasime sotsiaalmeediaks, oli tegelikult lihtsalt massimeedia – ainult et kohutavalt halb ja katki. Õnneks on ajakirjanikud ja sisuloojad lõpuks hakanud mõistma, kuidas vanadest meediamudelitest lahti lasta ja liikuda helgemasse tulevikku.
Volume XCIII, No 15
Bestselling romance author Kennedy Ryan promises joy for all in her latest novel, Can’t Get Enough.
Steal this future
I had to blow up San Francisco to give it a future I wanted to live in. The City’s problems—from dwindling affordable housing and ongoing political corruption, to a bizarre lack of trash cans and funding for public transit—seem so insurmountable at this point that I started fantasizing about what would happen after a complete reset. That’s how my forthcoming science fiction novel “Automatic Noodle” began to take shape.
Social media is dead - here’s what comes next
One of the not-funny ironies of the 21st century has been that everything we thought was social media is actually just mass media, except it’s terrible and broken. Luckily, journalists and creators are finally figuring out how to leave the old media models behind and enter the future. The term “mass media” became popular in the 1920s to describe pop culture in the age of industrial production.
The Fall and Rise of the California Republic
The Trans March in San Francisco is usually pretty chaotic—there are no fancy floats or formal activities—but this year a group had gotten their shit together to make an enormous, street-spanning trans flag. Its pink, white, and blue stripes stretched for nearly a quarter block.
AUTOMATIC NOODLE
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy. Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006). A zombie apocalypse is one thing.
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