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The Warm Machine by Aimee Cozza

When a robot built for construction work first sees an angular, sleek prototype military robot slink onto the base he's working outside of, he immediately falls in love. The problem is, only anomalous bots understand the concept of love, and the lowly laborbot has not deviated from his default programming once. So he thinks, anyway. When the laborbot is scheduled for decommission, the military bot cannot possibly live without him, and the two bots set out on a path to find the fabled anomalous robot utopia Root. COVER ARTIST: Aimee Cozza PUBLISHER: 9mm Press YEAR: 2024 LENGTH: 196 pages  AGE: Adult GENRE: Science Fiction RECOMMENDED: Highly Queer Rep Summary: The main characters are robots, likely closest to aro/ace but those terms aren't quite applicable. Gender is also not an important factor. THE WARM MACHINE plays with ideas of friendship, connection, and searching for utopia, all through the lens of a construction robot who falls in love at first sight with a military bot....

Visser by K. A. Applegate

Visser by K. A. Applegate has to balance two competing ideas: Hatred for a main enemy of the Animorphs, with some sympathy for her. The explanations are moving and the story is very good but we are not endeared to her. It also sets up the history of the Yeerk invasion on Earth.

It's a very good explanation of how we arrived at this point, but even Visser One's explanation of her own actions are not enough to make her host care about her. Parts of it are things that we might accept from a human as reasons for her actions, but if they were really her motiviation then it wouldn't have made sense for her to call the Yeerk Empire to Earth in the first place. There's something interesting there, both in how the cognitive dissonance is portrayed, and in how each step makes sense with the steps before and after. Even with this, the path of her actions meanders wildly between something understandable to (and even approved of by) her fellow Yeerks, and something that is very, very, human.

A blue centaur-like alien (and Andalite) stands in front of a field of stars

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