Format warning: This is another audiobook listen!
I picked this one up because after a few non-fiction nature books I fancied something more like my usual fare that was a bit fun and fast-paced. I’d heard good things about We Are Legion (We Are Bob) so decided to give it a go.
I’m very glad I did.
The story follows Bob after he’s been cryogenically frozen and then woken up as a computer to be put in a probe exploring space.
That’s the pitch of the book so at the beginning, from our perspective it’s pretty obvious what’s happened to Bob and maybe that realisation felt a little longer as I’m listening to the audiobooks so can’t really skim the bits that are obvious. But there again the character dealt with the transition from human to CPU well and didn’t drag on with any existential dread or anything which was a potential danger with things like this.
Other than that it is a fun book which deals with the ideas of space travel, artificial intelligence, and self-replicating spaceships rather well. It’s a fun romp through space and we grow as Bob grows (self-replicates) his copies get their own personalities and it is fun to see them bounce off of each other and how they interact.
One of my (few) criticisms is that the book felt like it ended too soon. I’m not sure whether this was because it sucked me in so much and I got through it so quickly but I felt that the story stopped quite quickly and I was very glad to be able to pick the second one straight up.
I don’t know what else to say really apart from the fact that this was just really fun. It has a classic sci-fi ‘exploring the galaxy’ kind of feel but the stakes do become raised throughout the book rather than just a ‘oh look here’s a shiny new planet’ throughout. The characters (even though they’re almost all technically Bob) go well together and it’s interesting to see the interaction of non-Bobs with the Bobs and the idea of a self-replicating AI as well as the idea of space travel taking a long time and the events you could miss were all dealt with well.
This is definitely one I’ll be recommending to anyone looking for a good, fun read that does deal with interesting and new ideas.