The Bookish Bard

Welcome to the Bobiverse!

What can I say?

A tech entrepreneur dies in an accident and wakes up centuries later with no body, no real idea what’s going on, and his consciousness transformed into a self-replicating AI. That’s the basic premise of We Are Legion (We Are Bob).

I’ll be honest, it sounded a bit… I don’t know? Bland?

But I couldn’t have been more wrong. Dennis E. Taylor takes what could have been a fairly dry sci-fi concept and turns it into something genuinely funny, surprisingly thoughtful and incredibly easy to get into. He manages to explain fairly complex scientific ideas in a really simple way, making them easy to understand.

Taylor’s love for older-style sci-fi clearly shines through, with many a Star Trek reference. One of my favourite parts in the book is when two of “The Bobs” are debating whether to interfere to save a humanoid species early into their evolution.

Bob Prime queries, “What about the Prime Directive?” The other Bob then has to remind him that they don’t need to follow Star Trek rules. 😂

Each time Bob replicates himself, there are more and more variations in his personality, with each Bob choosing a new name to avoid confusion. One Bob names himself Riker and creates a VR of the Starship Enterprise as his sort of base of operations.

The issue with this is that I now imagine all the Bobs as looking exactly like Jonathan Frakes. 🙈😂

On the subject of Riker, he replicates himself, and this replicant styles himself as Homer Simpson and, of course, names himself Homer. Leaving you with the surreal imagined sight of Homer Simpson and Will Riker debating morality on the bridge of the Enterprise….

Among the enjoyable journey the plot takes you down are more serious ideas and parallels to current geopolitics. I’ll not go into this too deeply, as I don’t want to get political this early into my reviewing career. 😂

Overall, this is a fantastic opening salvo in this epic series, which I believe is up to book 7 in audio format and book 5 in hardback. I’m guessing the series is heading towards some kind of civil Bob war and, oddly, I can’t wait. 😂

I would throughly recommend this book.

I’ve started book 2 and will post a review soon. 😊