We Are Legion: We Are Bob by Dennis E. Taylor

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Bob Johansson has just sold his software company and is looking forward to a life of leisure. There are places to go, books to read, and movies to watch. So it’s a little unfair when he gets himself killed crossing the street. 

Bob wakes up a century later to find that corpsicles have been declared to be without rights, and he is now the property of the state. He has been uploaded into computer hardware and is slated to be the controlling AI in an interstellar probe looking for habitable planets. The stakes are high: no less than the first claim to entire worlds. If he declines the honor, he’ll be switched off, and they’ll try again with someone else. If he accepts, he becomes a prime target. There are at least three other countries trying to get their own probes launched first, and they play dirty. 

The safest place for Bob is in space, heading away from Earth at top speed. Or so he thinks. Because the universe is full of nasties, and trespassers make them mad – very mad.

We Are Legion

From Cryonics to the Cosmos

The following ratings are out of 5:
Story/Plot: 📕📗📙📔📘
World building: 🌏🌍🌎🌏🌍
Character development: 😋😉😎😮😍
Narration: 🎙🎙🎙🎙🎙
Narration Type: Solo Narration

Characters and Plot Summary

Bob Johansson is exactly the kind of character I enjoy following in science fiction because he approaches the completely absurd situation he finds himself in with a programmer’s curiosity and a healthy dose of sarcasm. After selling his tech company and becoming wealthy, Bob arranges to have his head cryogenically preserved after his death. Unfortunately, his plans for the distant future arrive much sooner than expected when he is killed shortly afterward. When Bob wakes up 117 years later, he discovers that the world he knew is gone and that his cryogenically preserved brain has been purchased by Applied Cynergetics.

Things get even stranger when Bob learns that his brain has been scanned and his consciousness now exists inside a computer system. Worse, he is essentially corporate property. The theocratic government that has taken control of the United States has outlawed cryonics, eliminated the old internet, and created the Ministry of Proper Thought, making Bob extremely careful about what he says while he is being evaluated. People who outwardly disagree with policy now face a possibility of being subjected to re-education through direct neurological manipulation is genuinely disturbing.

Then Bob learns what his actual purpose is. He is being prepared to control a self-replicating Von Neumann probe that will travel to the stars looking for resources and potential new homes for humanity. His reaction that this is basically every nerd’s dream job pretty much sums up Bob perfectly. Once he is finally launched, the story becomes an entertaining combination of space exploration, engineering problems, artificial intelligence, and Bob trying to figure out what it actually means to still be himself.

Highlights and Limitations

The thing I enjoyed most was watching Bob embrace his new existence without completely losing the human side of himself. I loved that after becoming a computer capable of traveling through space, one of his first personal decisions was to make a detour to Saturn simply because it was his favorite planet and he wanted to see it. That felt very Bob to me.

I also had a lot of fun with his virtual reality environment, particularly the Lazy-Boy, the animals, and GUPPI, or Guppy, his fishlike interface companion. Those details kept the story from becoming nothing but technical explanations. Bob may be a computer now, but he still wants familiar comforts and companionship.

The cloning concept was probably my favorite part. When Bob begins creating copies of himself, they aren’t simply interchangeable versions of the same personality. Each copy develops its own interests and quirks while still retaining Bob’s memories and basic personality. Watching the different Bobs begin making their own decisions and pursuing different goals made the title suddenly make perfect sense.

I did occasionally find the amount of technical discussion a little dense, particularly when Bob gets deep into engineering, programming, or the mechanics of his ship. It didn’t ruin the experience for me, but there were moments when I was more interested in what Bob was actually doing than in every detail of how he was accomplishing it.

Narration

Ray Porter was an excellent choice for this audiobook. His delivery works particularly well for Bob’s dry humor and sarcastic observations, and I found myself associating his voice with Bob almost immediately. He also does a great job making the conversations between the various versions of Bob easy to follow.

I especially enjoyed the narration once there were multiple Bobs interacting with each other. Since they share the same basic identity but gradually develop their own personalities, Porter has to give them enough distinction to keep those scenes from becoming confusing. He handles that really well. His performance was also a big reason the technical sections remained entertaining for me.

There is definitely a reason this audiobook has become so closely associated with Ray Porter’s performance. The audiobook runs just under ten hours, and I found myself wanting to keep listening to see what Bob would get himself into next.

Final Thoughts

I really enjoyed this one. It gave me some serious Project Hail Mary vibes, and that comparison isn’t just because both audiobooks feature Ray Porter. I loved the combination of science, problem solving, isolation, humor, and a protagonist who has to figure out how to survive when everything familiar has been taken away.

What surprised me most was how much I cared about Bob’s identity after he stopped having a human body. The story could have treated him as nothing more than an artificial intelligence, but his decision to visit Saturn, build a virtual body and home for himself, surround himself with familiar things, and eventually create new versions of himself made the question of what makes someone human much more interesting.

The ending also left me wanting more because I had become genuinely invested in the different Bobs and their individual paths. I was particularly curious about how their personalities would continue to diverge and what would happen when their individual choices started creating consequences for everyone else.

For me, We Are Legion (We Are Bob) was a really fun mix of hard science fiction, humor, exploration, and surprisingly thoughtful questions about identity and humanity. I absolutely plan to continue with the Bobiverse because by the end of this book, I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to Bob, or any of his copies.

Blog|Goodreads|Facebook|Instagram|Pinterest|BookBub



View all my reviews