The Cybernetic Teashop by Meredith Katz, and also some Backstory

Hello! I have a backlog of a few reviews that I’ll be trickling out so that anyone reading this can get a sense for my style and sassy opinions, because I’m whacky like that. A lot of them are negative, though, so I’ll sprinkle some good stuff in there along the way.

A theme of my reading lately is that I lose track of where I get my sapphic lit from. Understand, I was raised on the zoomer(though I’m not really one) regimen of 4kids localized anime – Pokemon to One Piece and then Naruto, Zatch Bell and such. Then I got into US Shonen Jump/Advanced and also Shojo Beat. In effect, school book orders made me a weeaboo as a child. Scary, I know! When I became the gay and started seeking out queer fiction... well, I stumbled into Topside Press and others, which in ways was a mistake. But I ALSO read a lot of yuri. Yes, I’m not very happy about it because I saw too much of awkward school children failing to communicate. I like a slow burn, but stuff like Bloom Into You, Milk Morinaga’s output, did not appeal to me. I did find things to like; Tamifull’s How Do We Relationship, Fusoroi No Renri by Mikanuji, and a few others. Moving through Webtoons, Manhua and Manhwa provided some better stuff in general - Always Human, After the Curtain Call, Blooming Sequence, Ghosts of Greywoods, Love Lila, Mage & Demon Queen, Mojito, Soulmate, Re-Blooming, What Are The Chances, and all kinds of other series that aren’t finished yet!

The real breakthrough for my young gay ass, though, was just looking for plain ol’ novels. No anime tiddies, no sunbaes, just the text. I wasn’t even specifically looking into romance, but starting with things like Those Who Wait(Haley Cass), Dreams(Serena J Bishop) and One Last Stop(Casey McQuinston) meant that I fell into the genre pretty easily. It’s hard not to love reading about cool gals doing gay shit, frankly. Felt very represented, and tons of them feature bonus themes around queerness in general. The odd coming out story, identity deep-dives, stuff that usually dominates a story in (my very small experience of)typical queer fiction. In romance landia, all of that is secondary to lesbians(and other wlw, and sometimes nonbinary peeps!) finding love and happiness and the best damn sex you could hope for.

So nowadays, I try to keep up with the Google News feed of queer romance novels, check Goodreads for recs every now and then, and I even used to browse and speak on Reddit about it. This time a few years ago, I was slamming F5 waiting for gay comics to refresh – now my to-be-read pile is so out of control, I’m never going to finish it. I like it that way, because it was once said that a TBR is more like a wine cellar, and you bust out a bottle(book) when you’re in the mood.

Sometimes, though, a concept jumps out at you, and a tagline like “asexual robot lesbians” really does catch the eye.

The latest to emerge from my lake of recs is The Cybernetic Teashop by Meredith Katz! Its concept
is this; the speculative future is pretty normal except that AI has come the rest of the way along, and people have these goofy little "dumb AI" (think Halo) companions for all kinds of things and in all kinds of shapes, called a Raise. Hummingbirds for making toast and coffee, dogs that can download tons of porn(because people are not nice to their computers, so why be nice to sentient robots?), et cetera...

Briefly, when the excitement over AI reached a fever pitch, companies created and sold "true AI"(or indeed "smart AI”) which is pretty much the singularity, a computerized human-alike being that is fully sentient and sapient, capable of learning and modifying its own code. Pretty ‘based’ as the kids say, except that manufacturing living beings is kinda sus. Buying and selling living beings is even more sus, but it's the USA and I guess Confederate minds never got over the whole "sTaTeS rIgHtS" thing. Cooler heads eventually prevailed, and the law forbade further manufacture of true AI robots. It didn't give the extant true AI 'bots any real rights, though, so think the Nexus series from Blade Runner except instead of being in hiding and going violent for a chance to live, most true AI 'bots just settle down into tame existences until they break down, which usually takes hundreds of years.

This brings us to Clara, a human lady who works as a Raise technician(read: deleting porn viruses) is a drifter from a poor background who mostly travels from place to place because it’s what her parents did, and fixing people’s Raises when they download “purple_rain.mp3.exe” is good paying work. As a result, she’s not really interested in committing or settling down anywhere. When she comes to Seattle, though, her boss takes note of her special interest(is Clara neurodiverse? You decide!) and points her to a café that she “just has to see”, but won’t say anything about, so okay.

On the flip-side we have Sal, a true AI robot lady around 280 years old. Coincidentally, the fact that people programmed robots to have binary gender identities sends me. Sal was purchased new by a lady named Karinne, and Karinne was pretty cool people. She treated Sal more like a person than an appliance, and eventually things got a bit romantic! We don’t get details, but the ethics of loving the lady to whom you are internally registered to, which is basically a step short of ownership, are no problem here. But as it turns out, humans are good for maybe 100 years max? Whereas the magic of silicon processors mean that even in her dilapidated state, all burned batteries and worn memory chips, Sal probably has a few hundred years left.

What does any being do with shark-level life expectancy? Well, Karinne left Sal her eponymous teashop, with the hope of it seeing 300 years of operation or forever. Because, again, Sal’s internal programming has her registered to Karinne, Cybernetic Teashop became her entire life’s purpose, and she’s kept it running through anti-robot protests, vandalism and even a bombing.

At its core, Cybernetic Teashop is about entropy, humanity, moving on, and also being gay. With a robot lady.

I will say, it’s very handy that Clara herself is asexual, because whoever designed the Sarah line of robots opted to program them to have genders, but not for sexuality of any kind. Which makes sense in terms of an appliance or object, because why would a robot built as a household assistant need sexuality?(don’t answer that) But it kind of brings up some scuffed questions; the idea seems to be that Sal, and all other Sarahs are asexual by nature, but... singularity. Surely they could grow and evolve as people, eventually desiring sexual encounters? Do the provisions exist in these robots for swapping in a freshly upholstered pussy? Does Sal just have kind of a Barbie body? Even moreso, can the true AI develop feelings of gender fluidity, or even non-binarism? Can that be considered innate to them, as it is humans? I really wish the novella would go deeper into this; at the least it could be interesting. At the most, Cybernetic Teashop desperately needs the worldbuilding.

For what it’s worth, Sal herself is genuinely asexual as well so neither party is that worried about whether or not you should fist androids. They’re very content to kiss, cuddle and lay in bed. That’s cool in itself, because when Clara meets Sal, our android girl usually spends her rest-time charging in seated position on a kitchen floor. I liked watching her get comfortable with more human accoutrements in general.

That sort of leads into my issue with Cybernetic Teashop as a whole though, I guess. I love Sal, and I love watching Clara help her maintain herself, because bodily and programming maintenance is both scary and deeply intimate/personal for true AI. I love watching Sal move on in life and value her own wellbeing, they’re a lovely pair, but it’s all WAY too short. I want more time for worldbuilding, discussion of true AI ethics and rights, bodily autonomy, the history of true AI, so on and so forth. Teashop is only 55 pages and so sadly we don’t get much in the way of ‘lore’. Actually, I want more everything. More time with my lesbians in which one is a robot. Does Sal have any unique feelings about loving a human? What is her conception of love even like, is it any different to the norm? Does she feel weird about having been created? So many questions, so many reasons to want a sequel.

Do I recommend Cybernetic Tea House? Absolutely, but it’s kind of a good example of why I tend to steer away from shorter stuff. Meredith Katz doesn’t seem to have written any other lesbian fiction, which is deeply annoying. I want a full-length novel; it’s my queer-sff instincts speaking, but there is so much untread ground here.