We Are Legion (We Are Bob)
3/5. Listened to it on Audible — first book in Dennis E. Taylor’s Bobiverse series. Voice acting was decent.
The sci-fi premise is the best part: a guy dies and wakes up as the AI running a self-replicating probe, and the book leans into the moral and practical mess that follows. Each copy of “Bob” is a full, independent consciousness with its own personality drift, which makes replication uncomfortably close to cloning a person into slavery — every new Bob starts as property of whoever controls the mission, not a free agent. That thread doesn’t run through the whole book, though — he breaks free early. The book itself reaches for the word “replicant” a few times to describe Bob and his copies, though that’s a Blade Runner term for a bioengineered body and doesn’t quite fit what’s actually happening here — a scanned human mind running as software, not something grown. Layer 3D-printer-driven self-replication on top of it and you get an interesting model for colonization: each probe doesn’t just explore, it builds the factory that builds the next several probes, so the frontier expands geometrically instead of linearly. I also liked the book’s warnings about what a theocratic America could curdle into — the FAITH storyline back on Earth is doing real work as political commentary, not just plot filler.
None of this is the book’s fault, but it’s worth saying: the self-replicating, colonize-everything premise used to be uncomplicated fun for me, and it isn’t anymore. It’s hard these days to hear “let’s go colonize space” without hearing it as branding for a handful of billionaires — Musk being the obvious one — treating space as their personal manifest destiny while the kleptocracy back home gets worse. That’s not really about Musk specifically so much as it is about that whole class of people; he just happens to be the one standing closest to this particular genre. It’s soured a trope I used to enjoy without complication, and this book got some of that secondhand.
The rest of it is weaker. It runs long in stretches — a fair amount of it could’ve been tightened. It clearly thinks it’s funnier than it is — a pretty common failure mode for geek-culture sci-fi, where the reference-heavy quipping reads as cleverer to the author than to the reader. And it resolves maybe a third of the subplots it opens, which I’m pretty sure is less “the story demanded it” and more “there’s more money in a series than a novel,” an incentive the genre seems to lean on a lot lately. I’m not against a series on principle, but I want more closure at the end of any individual book than this one gives.
I have the same complaint about Dungeon Crawler Carl — big cast of dangling threads, banking everything on “read the next one” — even though I like that series more overall than this one.