Review: We are Legion (We are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor

Blurb:

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.

Review:

I got this book as a birthday present from one of my school friends… and to say that I’ve enjoyed reading it is an understatement. From the day I received and read the book to today, I’ve read the book twice and listened to the audiobook once - and I’d read or listen to this book again in a heartbeat. 

“What is the book about?”, or “Why is it called “we are bob” in parenthesis?”, you might ask yourself as you’re reading this review. 

Bob Johannson is your typical engineer who just made a deal of a lifetime in the software industry, before then using that wealth to purchase an afterlife as a frozen head, at least, until tech exists to bring him back from that state. Too bad that that purchase he made came into effect just a few hours afterwards, when a car slammed into him as he was crossing the street. Fast forward a hundred years or so, and he’s brought back as a human AI, a replicant, without. Fair enough, it would be boring if he spent all his time in a lab afterwards, for the reader. Except, that’s not the case, for he is to go to space. As a probe, with 3D printers to make replicas of himself. 

That’s where the name came from.

What did I, what do I, like about the book?

The replicants of Bob. Hands down, the most hilarious cloning attempts I’ve seen in any medium. Think of the clone troopers from Star Wars, all with their distinct personalities, even if they come from the DNA of one guy. Except, replace all the clone troopers with engineer clones of Bob, who is, aside from being an engineer, a huge nerd. This leads to the replicas of Bob to be… for a lack of a better word… very similar, or very different, to him.

And if you like 80s and 90s references, the replicas are right up your alley.

Then, the shortness of the book. You’d think a book about human replicas exploring space would be long and tedious to read. But it’s only 293 pages. It’s easy to just pick it up after work and lose yourself to the world building for a few hours, and then, suddenly, you’ve reached the end.

That’s not the end of it. Because of this being a Science Fiction novel, you’d think that everything that had something to do with how the replication process was achieved would be waved away as “Science Fiction magic”. You’d think this book would do so similarly. And it absolutely doesn’t. There’s actually an explanation for how everything is achieved. No science formulas, because it’s not that kind of sci-fi book that includes mathematical formulas into the story, no… it keeps the science to a simple explanation and leaves it at that. Every science fiction aspect in this book has some simple explanation for how it works.

After that, this is surprisingly not the last thing I’d like to say I like about this book are the acronyms. Holy everliving heck does this book have some hilarious acronyms that the author definitely had fun coming up with.

‘Lastly, really, the last part about what I liked about the book was the audiobook version. Some audiobooks put you to sleep, others keep you hooked for hours on end. This one… this one had me cackling in a beanbag chair over the course of a day last year. It’s only about nine hours long and it’s worth the money. Not only does the narrator SCREAM the name Bob in your head. Not only that, but he also goes in and adds a pitch perfect replica of some of the Bob characters that were inspired by popular media characters, while also adding in Bob’s underlying accent into them.

The only gripe, if I can even call it that, that I have with this book, is the ending. Can’t say too much about the ending… but it makes me livid and also insanely curious about the next book of the trilogy, since “For we are many”, the second instalment to the series, picks up on that last sentence of “We are Legion (We are Bob)”.

All in all, a great book that hits the spot if you’re looking for a space opera with hilarious characters and high stakes tension. 

If you’re more into the Fantasy books, I’d recommend checking out other reviews here on this site, like Boe’s review of “The Winds of Change (Elements of TIme)” by Sam Paisley or the my soon to be written review of “Yellow Sky Revolt” by Baptiste Pinson Wu. Alternatively, if you want to look for an even more sci-fi and even more off the rails book than “We are Legion (We are Bob)”, check out Joseph John Lee's review of “Empire of Silence” by Christopher Roucchio. Who knows? You might find your next favourite book after reading the reviews here.

If you’re reading this, you’ve reached the end of this review. Thank you for taking your time to read this, and hopefully we here at SFF Insiders have helped you choose your next read.

Have a wonderful rest of your day!