We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

I'm perfectly happy to read a routine science fiction story, but producing a viable one is apparently harder than it looks these days, as I've been disappointed by most of the books I've read in that vein of late. This one is not a disappointment, as our protagonist is a paradigmatic competent man who is awaken into a world of self-destructive idiots. If you want to be cynical and say that the author just wrote his own personal fantasy of achievement, fine, it's an admirable personal fantasy. Reminiscent of a cross between Andy Weir at his analytic best, and John Scalzi at 8/10's of maximum snark, I'm now looking forward to reading the rest of the trilogy.

This is exactly what great sci-fi is. Future tech, questioning the laws of physics and the human condition, and having an author who can wield it all in a good story with some great humor.

I was really hooked into this book about three chapters in and the pacing of it is so well done. The contents could have been lost in cumbersome detail or following too many plot paths but Taylor is a master at his craft. Yes, you could have an AI that mimics in all ways the deceased Bob question his reality and if he's human or not but the tone in which those questions are asked, and within the story revised, matches together perfectly. An AI personality, Bob, can copy himself and while there are different pairs and paths, the story follows four main show more paths and they are distinct enough, with the different Bob personalities, that you don't get lost in them. Also, when you have stories like this you almost have one favorite or one you don't want to break away from because the story was just getting good. However, each Bob personality is close enough to a character you like and the stories are equally interesting that I didn't find myself picking a favorite.

This is a story I would give someone just getting into sci-fi as an adult. This was really a great premise, great writing, and good humor. The choices made and the logic involved is believable even within a sci-fi future setting. It was so good that I didn't realize I was at the end of the book and immediately had to let the person who recommended it to me that I enjoyed it so much and I picked up the others in the series and looking forward to other writings by the author. I can't wait to start the next in the series. Final Grade - A+ show less

Bob just sold his successful tech company and is massively rich. One of the first things he does with his newfound wealth is sign up to have his head cryogenically frozen upon his death. Not long after that, he's killed in an accident...and wakes up more than 100 years later as an AI. He is now property, and he's been selected as one of four candidates for the job of exploring and colonizing space for FAITH, the government that owns him. It's a good thing that Bob views this as his dream job. First, however, he has to beat the other three candidates, keep from going crazy like so many other AIs in the past, and avoid being destroyed by one of the many groups that don't want this project to succeed. Although Bob does make it into space, show more it's a rockier beginning than he expects.

I can't remember if I bought this on sale or if I used an Audible credit, but, either way, it was a waste. I only managed to finish it in a reasonable amount of time because of Ray Porter's excellent narration. He made the lengthy technical explanations slightly more bearable. His range of female voices seems to be pretty limited (I think this is the third audiobook he's narrated that I've listened to), but since none of the prominent characters were female and there were maybe only three female characters with speaking roles, that wasn't really an issue here.

I picked this up because I like books with prominent AI characters. Bob was technically an AI, even though he'd started off as a human. For me, the best part of the book was the period between when Bob woke up as an AI and when he was launched into space. I enjoyed reading about him adapting to his new life and skills, even as I rolled my eyes a bit at how easily everything came to him.

The first part of Bob's life in space, before he started replicating himself, was tolerable, but not great. I wasn't a fan of Bob's decision to build a VR environment for himself. Taylor's reasoning for it sounded okay (AI craziness is at least in part caused by sensory deprivation, because the human minds the AIs are built from expect sensory input they aren't getting), but I didn't want to read about some guy living in his magical environment that he could change at will. I vastly preferred it when Bob was housed in a very nonhuman body that was little more than a camera and some manipulators.

When Bob began populating his environment with animals, including a beloved cat from back when he'd still been human, I began to worry that he'd start recreating people he'd known and loved when he was alive. My biggest fear was that he'd recreate his ex-girlfriend. I was surprised and relieved that it never once crossed Bob's mind to do any of this.

After Bob found a stopping point and began replicating himself, the story branched a bit and should have become more interesting. Instead, it became more tedious and considerably less focused.

Each Bob renamed himself in an effort to make things less confusing, and the book followed multiple Bob POVs. I did my best to keep count, and by the end the total Bob count was 30 and the total number of Bobs who got to be POV characters was up to 9 or 10. This was one of the few aspects where I regretted the audiobook format a bit, since the different Bob POVs were briefly identified at the beginning of a section/chapter and were often difficult to tell apart if I missed hearing Porter say their names. Although each Bob viewed the other Bobs as having radically different personalities, the personality differences weren't as noticeable in the different POV sections.

One of the Bobs (Bill) opted to stay in one place and act as a Bob factory, tech researcher, and communication center. One set of Bobs headed back to Earth to see how things were going and whether there was even any point in looking for habitable planets anymore. Most of the other Bobs went in different directions and began exploring - some of what they found tied in with the storyline involving Earth, some of it led to action scenes involving an enemy AI, and some of it had nothing to do with anything as far as I could tell. Probably setup for the next book.

The discovery of the Deltans, intelligent but low-tech beings on one of the Bob-discovered planets, fit into the last category. Sadly, I found it to be more interesting than the primary storyline involving the fate of humanity, even as Bob's actions and plans made me more and more uncomfortable.

Bob (original Bob) discovered the Deltans and, at first, decided just to watch them. He gradually became more involved, to the point that he considered culling one of the Deltans' natural enemies, the gorilloids, in order to make the Deltans' lives easier. Another Bob disapproved of this, although I got the impression that his disapproval was based more on his dislike of making the Deltans dependent on the Bobs and less on any qualms about genocide. Original Bob spent a lot of time studying the Deltans and almost no time studying the gorilloids. I wasn't as willing as he was to discount the possibility that the gorilloids were also sentient and sapient beings.

We Are Legion (We Are Bob)'s biggest problem was that it was boring. Taylor included a massive amount of technical detail, and I really just did not care. I say this as someone who largely enjoyed the scientific explanations and technical details in Andy Weir's The Martian.

It probably didn't help that I couldn't bring myself to care about the various Bobs and their storylines, either. The humans in Taylor's vision of the future were largely annoying and seemed determined to literally argue themselves to death. Rather than talk to each other, share knowledge and resources, and generally help each other out, they preferred to argue about who got to evacuate first and then refused to so much as share a planet. As for the Bobs, I never became very attached to any of them and didn't even feel a twinge when any of them died. After all, the Bobs themselves barely mourned each other, and they could always just make new ones, even though the personalities wouldn't be the same.

Early on, Bob worried about losing his humanity and was reassured that he was still human when he regained his ability to grieve for the family members of his who'd long since died. Honestly, though, he should have continued to worry, because that moment of grief seemed to be his first and last deeply felt emotion in the entire book.

I don't currently plan on continuing this series. I'm not sure I could take another book filled with dozens of iterations of Bob, even with Ray Porter narrating it.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) show less

This is a marvelous example of "problem-solving" sf, very busy, great story, and very funny. While a little thin on character development, even that aspect is humorous and appropriate to the main character, Bob. However, as I kept reading, it began to bother me how merrily devoid of women the story is. I get it that Bob is a whopping nerd, happiest when, you got it, solving problems, but given the fact that every Bob clone turns out to be quite different I began to wonder . . . why not one who is . . . REALLY different? Furthermore since Bob does a lot of VR and he had a girlfriend and presumably they . . . and he was at the start of the book heartbroken over the break-up (before the RL Bob died), it seems a stretch when he wakes up as show more a "replicant" (bodiless, in digital form)that he NEVER seems to have ANY problems with living in a female-free world! It makes it hard to fully believe in him, I'm afraid.

I want to add, this is not a PC problem on my part. There was a moment, when I was in my teens rereading LOTR for the nth time when I had a horrible realization that it was Eowyn or nothing, and it just broke my heart given how much I loved the story and had been in such close identification with the hobbits up to that point. Since then, I just can't help feeling left out when there's no balance at all. I give writers from earlier times dispensation, including Tolkien, but, it's a real problem for me in contemporary sf and fantasy -- especially when the writer is significantly YOUNGER than me.

In this first book I've decided to give Taylor and Bob space--there was a ton of stuff going on and Bob has been a busy dude., but I was, by the end, disappointed that there was no hint of a Bobette. While it is almost plausible that original Bob, fully occupied, wouldn't miss female company or get curious about what it might feel like being female, or just, to be frank, get horny (Gene Roddenberry didn't shy from that, did he?), Taylor does need to think all this over and in case he sneaks around reading reviews, I'm bringing this up. To keep the attention and interest of women (and no doubt some men) sf readers, it would be a good idea to come up with something, and not a stupid thing, but something refreshing and open-minded and commonsensical, a la Bob. Everything else worked fine--Taylor put a lot of energy into coming up with plausible solutions to various problems although I worry a little that Taylor has set up a couple of situations that might turn out to be difficult to disentangle the Bobs from in a convincing way, but I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt about all of it for now. Originality and momentum ace the other issues this time. **** show less

Bob Johansson is living the good life. He's recently sold his software company for an obscene amount of money and has just signed a contract with a cryogenics company to have his body frozen at the time of his death so he can be brought back once technology has advanced enough to cure what ailed him. So it's completely unfair that he gets himself killed while crossing the street during a convention. A little over a hundred years later Bob wakes up as a digital copy of himself, one of five replicants of different people that have been created in the hopes that one of them will be able to pilot a probe to search for other habitable planets. A lot has changed while Bob was out. There has been global economic collapse. Countries have fallen show more and risen. There is a new space race only this time the stakes are so high that countries will kill to be the first and only ones out of the gate. It turns out that space may be the safest place for Bob after all...or not.

We Are Legion (We Are Bob) is the first book in Dennis E. Taylor's Bobiverse series. It's hard to believe this is the author's first book. The story is a lot of fun and well written. It reminds me of Ready Player One and Old Man's War with their tone, style of humor and many 80s references. It also has just enough science to keep things plausible though may be disappointing for those that like heavy science in their science fiction.

While the situation on earth with nations are at each others throats and Bob learning how to be a functional AI is interesting, the meat of the story happens after Bob makes it into space. Seeing how a single probe will take forever to search the galaxy, the first part of Bob's mission is to replicate himself. And he sure does! Each Bob has the essence of the original and yet also has their own voice, giving them almost a father/son relationship. Original Bob's first order to his replicants is to give themselves names so they can tell each other apart. This is where a lot of the 80s references come in with names like Riker, Garfield and Homer. It is a lot of fun figuring out where the references come from.

Bob and his clones are awesome. He has great one liners, a creative engineering mind and is an eternal optimist, especially when it comes to solving problems. Now that he is basically immortal as an AI it has changed his perspective somewhat when it comes to the concept of time. And yet he hasn't lost his humanity.

After Bob makes his clones, the story lines diverge as we follow along with what a select few Bobs are up to. There is a lot of space exploration, first contact with an alien civilization, a trip back to Earth to see how humanity fared, even some space combat with opposing probes. Unfortunately there are too many story threads that there's no way they can be resolved in one book. I'm so happy that book two releases in less than a month. I can't wait to download it.

I listened to the audio book narrated by Ray Porter. He is excellent! He nails the overall tone and humor of the story and does a great job of keeping all the Bobs the same yet different. He also portrays the difference between outward dialog and inner monologue well. Definitely not an easy task. show less

Follows an AI (awoken mind of cryogenically frozen human Bob) who is tasked with controlling a self-replicating interstellar probe. Bob escapes his control system and learns to operate his ship and manufacture new technology and cloning his consciousness. Eventually get different Bob perspectives and they start meeting alien species and lots of other stuff. Bob's persona sometimes feels a little smug to me. Like the exploration of copying identities. Would have liked more in depth treatment of first contact. Not motivated to continue series further.

What if you could put your brain in a computer… and it was AWESOME?

I feel like this is the closest I’ve ever been to someone who can capture the same blend of snarky comedy and well-researched science fiction that John Scalzi can.

The biggest challenge in a novel like this is that there is only one character. Which is because the plot demands it — it’s one person traveling alone for a long time. And when more characters are added, they’re the same character, because he can make copies of himself. So not a lot of diversity or dynamics in relationships. But at least it’s not due to authorial incompetence.

The best thing is that the main character is a regular guy. He’s a trope-savvy software engineer who doesn’t shirk away show more from the pop culture reference. He’s aware he’s in a 1950’s Isaac Asimov novel. In fact, he’s the only one of his “graduating class” that doesn’t go insane because he’s a brain-in-a-box because he likes it. He gets to live inside his mind, solve technical problems, explore space, and he can make his own friends. Sounds ideal to me.

It’s fast-paced, it’s witty, it’s got a layman’s POV of hard space travel science. I highly recommend. show less