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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....

Queen of the Conquered by Kacen Callender (Islands of Blood and Storm, #1)

On the islands of Hans Lollik, Sigourney Rose was the only survivor when her family was massacred by the colonizers. When the childless king of the islands declares he will choose his successor from amongst eligible noble families, Sigourney is ready to exact her revenge.

But someone is killing off the ruling families to clear a path to the throne. And as the bodies pile up and all eyes regard her with suspicion, Sigourney must find allies among her prey and the murderer among her peers... lest she become the next victim.

TITLE: Queen of the Conquered
AUTHOR: Kacen Callender
PUBLISHER: Orbit
YEAR: 2019
LENGTH: 400 pages 
AGE: Adult
GENRE: Fantasy, Mystery
RECOMMENDED: Highly

Queer Rep Summary: Gay/Achillean Secondary Character(s), Closeted/Questioning Secondary Character(s).

Queen of the Conquered is a meditation on colonialism and complicity which doubles as a slow-burn murder mystery. It handles discussions of race and slavery in a fictional setting better than I could possibly summarize in this space. Just... go read this one.

I'm frankly stunned by this book. I spent 80% of the book confident that I understood everything at stake, everyone involved... then the last part of the book just blew me away. I wasn't precisely wrong about the pieces, just very wrong about which ones were important. And that, I think, is part of the point. Sigourney spends much of the book chasing a prize which the others in power seek to deny her based on the color of her skin, wielding her own power often against the enslaved people on the island. The book conveys this tension so well and so subtly that it floors me.

The characters are complex and vivid, even filtered through the myopic lens of Sigourney's assumptions about them as the POV character. Her attention (or lack of it) is carefully managed by the author, she's not an unreliable narrator, per-say, but she is torn between competing drives and old promises. The world-building is really good, there's a lot of language specific to this book, particularly describing social relationships on the islands, but its introduced at a pace that was easy to keep up with.

CW for sexual content (brief), gaslighting (graphic), mental illness, grief (graphic), racism (graphic), alcohol, fire/fire injury, pregnancy, excrement, blood, violence, child abuse (graphic), sexual assault, rape, injury detail (brief), colonization (graphic), slavery (graphic), cannibalism (brief mention), mutilation, torture, genocide, suicidal thoughts, suicide, murder, parental death, child death, death (graphic).

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