The Cybernetic Tea Shop (2019)

I have questions about this heartening little SF novella by Meredith Katz. I’m not sure how to classify it, for one thing. It’s billed as a lesbian asexual romance and I’m sure at least that it’s a romance. In a future a few hundred years away, AI technology has reached a point where some robots are considered sentient. The result is that laws have placed limits on what technology can be developed and some robots now have specific grandfathered civil rights. One such is Sal, who has operated a tea shop in Seattle for 278 years—Capitol Hill, I think (Katz lives in Vancouver, BC). Sal still has problems with anti-robot vandals. Clara is a software developer who specializes in AI. She keeps a mechanical talking hummingbird as a pet and assistant. She’s also something of a drifter, never staying more than a year or two in any place before moving on. This is attributed to her background as the daughter of Latinx migrant workers. I would hope they’d sort out migrant worker civil rights before robots, but maybe not. Or maybe they have, because Clara’s parents don’t seem especially economically oppressed. That’s beside the point, but I do have questions like that about aspects of this story. The relationship between Clara and Sal develops pretty fast and has a physical component if not a sexual one, which raised questions for me about asexuality. But all these questions also kept me intrigued with a genre, romance, that doesn’t generally appeal to me. This was “highly recommended” by the booktuber Kazen at Always Doing. It doesn’t tempt me much into any more romances, but it does make me want to read more about asexuality. I identified more with the desires of Clara and Sal to be alone than with their loneliness, which was basically under control, not given as a bad thing but still there. Sal is an interesting character, lost after hundreds of years since her original creator died. This reminded me of Star Trek, particularly Data and his Freudian relationship with his creator (“Father”). Unlike Star Trek, however, Sal is given a range of real emotions. She doesn’t always know what to do with them, but they are real. For his part, Data shows emotions frequently, but they’re not considered valid or are rationalized. Clara the software engineer is able to tinker with Sal’s programming to make improvements and that is basically where the love affair begins. The sheer wholesome mental health of The Cybernetic Tea Shop is refreshing. Still, I have questions. Their sleeping together (setting aside issues of robots and sleeping), even without sex, seemed to me to put them in a realm well beyond friendship. I wasn’t sure how to take or interpret that, and I’m still not, but I enjoyed the book.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.