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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....
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Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear (White Space, #1)

Ancestral Night is an intimate exploration of identity and personhood which plays out across light-ans, oscillating smoothly between space battles, personal crises, and odes to cats in zero-g. I hope we get more in this universe, or one next door.

I enjoy portrayals of AI and aliens that make them feel like more than just human thoughts in different skins (or no skin, as the case may be). What I was not expecting, but I received, was a portrayal of a human whose mindset was so adjusted and influenced by technology that they sometimes felt alien. Haimey never crosses that line completely, but flits up to it enough that it made the narration feel precarious, like at any moment she could be a wholly different being. Part of what I appreciate is that this book engages with that idea in an interesting way (one which I don't intend to spoil). I like the answers it reaches, they feel actionable in a personal way, if not at a societal level.

As a longer book, the pacing is well-managed. It dragged a bit in the first third because there's a lot to establish, but then it catches momentum and has a good balance of contemplation and action. Because the narrator (Haimey) is encountering a lot of new technology it avoids a lot of easy opportunities to infodump (which is always a temptation in sci-fi). Watching her figure out how everything works is much more interesting that being explained to, even if the end result is the same. For the sections where she already knows what's going on, the explanations are a lot closer to the ideal where she just tells us what she's doing and we figure out the closest analog from context clues (e.g., "I got in the car and pulled out of the parking space" vs "I undid the latch on my conveyance powered by internal combustion and lowered my form onto the padded and adjustable frame...").

I like the world built here, and I'm excited that it's supposed to be a part of a series. I definitely plan to come back for more when it's available. *I no longer plan to read the sequel.

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