Bobiverse, My Guilty Pleasure

We Are Legion, the first book in the Bobiverse, has a lot of the same problems as Old Man's War by John Scalzi. It is told from the point of view of a sarcastic character with a weird sense of humor. It commits my major book sin of using too many pop cultural references. But I still enjoyed it.  

We are Legion , We are Bob was written by Canadian Computer programmer Dennis Taylor in 2016. It is the first book in the Bobiverse series. They are currently five in the series, the last was just released on Audible. 

It is about an engineer and programmer who signed up for a cryo-storage company, to freeze his body until it could be revived sometime in the future. Not long after, he gets hit by a bus, and wakes up a couple of hundred of years in the future.  His mind gets uploaded into a Von Neumann probe to explore nearby star systems in order to find life sustaining planets and to save the Earth. 

A Von Neumann probe is a self-replicating probe that can be used to mine and explore outer space. Once it gets to a new star system, it will seek out raw materials like iron and other minerals from asteroids, terrestrial planets, moons, as gas giants to create another copy of itself. Any living material will be cloned. Each of the new probes could then continue to explore other star systems. The debate is that because it can reproduce, has intelligence, and requires "food" is whether or not it is considered to be alive. So the Bobiverse asks the question "What would it be like to be a Von Neumann Probe?"

The story is told from the first person point of view of Robert "Bob" Johansson. He was a successful programmer and engineer who was a huge Star Trek fan.  After a buyout, he suddenly became rich and was ready to enter a new phase a life. His friends made fun of him for wasting money on the cryo-storage company.  He had money, ended a bad relationship, and was interested in reconnecting with his family. However, he was hit and basically killed. 

He was on ice for a while before society was advanced enough to thaw him out and upload his mind into a machine.  Being an introverted engineer, he was considered to be the perfect candidate as most of those uploaded into the machines went insane. It reminded me of the scene in Robocop 2 when multiple Robocops killed themselves once they realized that they were robots. 

Technology has advanced, but unfortunately so have weapons. The earth is at war and is destroying itself. Bob needs to be the first to make it to another star system before probes from other nations arrive. However, Bob, being so influenced by Star Trek, decides that it is more important to explore strange new worlds and to seek out new life. As he replicates himself, he follows his clones and their adventures throughout the galaxy. A few are sent back to earth to try to save humanity and deal with earth politics. 

The book was like living a fantasy of what it would be like to essentially be immortal and be able to explore star systems. The stars are based on real life stars and the possible worlds they could contain. It explores what first contact would be like and how advanced technology would seem like divine intervention, Reading the book was like going through a video game where you try to find new planets, terraform those that aren't quite ready for life, deal with first contact, and fight enemies for the right to have those planets. 

Bob had an annoying sense of humor and used way too many pop cultural references but he used enough science and actual possible scenarios to keep the story interesting. I felt like I was exploring right along with Bob and was excited as he made new discoveries. If he stuck to Star Trek references, it would have been better as Star Trek wasn't just entertainment for Bob, but it defined his morality and ideals. 

There were parts that dragged. I didn't like the parts that dealt with the clone named Riker and his dealings with Earth politics. I also wished that we got to know other Von Neumann Probe characters, but instead they were cardboard cutouts. 

I am excited to continue to explore the galaxy in this series and hope that Bob uses less pop cultural references and more science and learns to be his own thing outside of classic science fiction. 

This is my guilty pleasure. It is written in a very comedic, conversational style but is based on real astrophysics and theoretical science. I think it is a C or a B. I will give it a B not because of the style but because of the fun ideas. It is currently on Kindle Unlimited. The Audiobooks are also very popular, and it is probably better to listen to the audiobook over reading the book.