I don’t compare things to Firefly lightly, especially when they’re not set in space. But darned if this book didn’t give Firefly vibes the whole time
“Rusty Robot Face” by Anonymous Account is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
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Exhibit A: The War, by which I mean the war between robots and humanity that so many folks worry about. The robots win, but robot utopia doesn’t last very long. Our heroine, Brittle, was in The War, and flashes back on it often; even though she was on the winning side, a lot of things she did to get there were morally grey, even for robots.
Brittle is a former Caregiver robot who now scavenges the wastelands looking for dead–or dying–robots and spare parts she can sell to other robots. The titular Sea of Rust is her best hunting ground: a wide swath of land between Detroit and the eastern Ohio border that’s become a grassy graveyard where robots go to die. When her rival, Mercer, shows up with bad intentions, Brittle is forced to flee. This kicks off a chain of events that lead her to a sanctuary robot city, a mission she’d be a fool not to accept, and a very precarious truce with Mercer.
The main narrative is broken up by flashbacks to Brittle’s time in The War, the historical chain of events that led to humanity’s extinction, and what those flashbacks have to do with Brittle’s current mission. The way the robots speak and act remind me so much of Mal and Zoe that I keep thinking of Mercer and Brittle as Mal and Zoe….if they were out to kill each other, that is.
Here’s the quote that got me right in the feels:
“I lived so long for nothing, but I get to die for something. And that’s really living. Because that’s who I really was after all. That’s all that matters” (356).
But who says it, and why? That, my friend, you’ll have to read and find out for yourself.
What with the Firefly cast reuniting on their mysterious project, this is serendipitously timely. If you’re feeling much the same, and would like to revisit the intersection of sci-fi and the wild west (or midwest, as the case may be), this is your book.
