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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....

The Ellimist Chronicles by K. A. Applegate

The Ellimist Chronicles tells the story of a young Ketran from millions of years ago eventually becoming The Ellimist who intervened with The Animorphs as part of a galaxy-spanning fight against Crayak. This is my favorite book in the entire series. 💜

Toomin was a Ketran gamer kid who played VR under the name "Ellimist". For the rest of the story, you should just read this book. If you never intend to read the rest of the series, please, still check out The Ellimist Chronicles. It stands alone well-enough that I read this one separately from the main series over and over as a kid (that also says a lot about me). His journey is believable, the stakes and the scale ramp up in really interesting ways, and I love to hate the section on the watery moon with Father.

It has some of the feel of excellent portrayals of long-living elves in fantasy works, where small moments are important but a longer scale and slower rhythm must also be attended to. Specifically I'm thinking of R. A. Salvatore's portrayals of Drizzt in The Forgotten Realms, but there are others.

The Ellimist's story is dark but hopeful, he's desperately trying to win at a "game" where the stakes are the happiness and well-being of all life. It's a mature voice looking back on his early and middle life in development but not quite in time. The sheer scale of eons covered here is immense, and I love the teeming universe that we see here in a way that is implied but not specified in the main Animorphs series.

A figure with a long white beard and pointy ears stands in gray smoke

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