Skip to main content

Featured

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 City We Became by N. K. Jemisin (The Great Cities, #1)

The City We Became fits a lot of sff into a place big enough to handle it. I loved the boroughs as people and the conclusion left me wanting more. It makes NYC feel ordinary and epic at the same time; a glimpse of how much someone loves this place I've never seen. 

I don't have great sense of place or home but this book made me feel how much someone can care for a space, for a city. I loved that experience, this book felt really good to read. The characters are vibrant and distinct from one another, and I was really engaged with the story once it got going. As I neared the end, though, I kept checking to see if there were really that few pages left. This is book one of a trilogy, and some really cool things happen in the resolution of this part of the story, but my main complaint is that book two isn't here already. 

As for pacing, it starts out kind of slow; there's a lot of characters to introduce and so when the large cast was combined with an air of mystery (for some of them) it took me a little bit to get into it. I connected with one of them right away and then used that to slowly get the whole picture. At least part of that feeling is I've never been to New York, and so when some of the initial characterization is built on how much different characters embody parts of the city it meant I was learning the boroughs and the people instead of just learning new characters. That being said, I read the last 60% of the book in an afternoon, once I got into it I didn't want to put it down. Books don't have to create that urgency in order to be good, but I like how this one pulled me in. 

I feel very invested in this world and I definitely want to know what happens next. This is a story that needs to be continued, so it's very good that it's the start of a trilogy.

CW for discussion of large-scale disasters, racism, xenophobia, death.

Bookshop Affiliate Buy Link

The underside of a bridge with "The City We Became" in bright yellow letters.

Comments

Popular Posts