A review of We Are Legion
by
Dennis
Taylor
We Are Legion: (We Are Bob) was initially published by a small press a number of years ago, but recent buzz has brought it new attention and being reissued by a larger publisher. And that's where I came in. I found it on a list of forthcoming books, was intrigued by the idea of it, and now that I've read it, certainly think it lives up to the buzz.
Bob Johansson made a fortune selling his tech business. What's a techie guy with a lot of money to do? Make plans for his head to be cryogenically frozen in the event of his death so that one day in the future he might be brought back. Unfortunately for Bob, his death comes much sooner than he expected. And fortunately for Bob, there is the technology a century later to bring him back. Now he's not brought back and attached to a body. He's been brought back and had his consciousness uploaded into an AI and after training and proving he can keep his sanity, will be deployed to explore space. Of course Bob is initially pretty messed up by his new circumstances and the fact that the United States splintered apart in the intervening years and is now being run by a religiously extreme government. So when he learns his job will be to travel through space, he figures it's not such a bad gig. Of course that's before he realizes that several other countries have similar plans and their AIs are hostile to Bob (in the most weapon-forward way).
Though this did bog down, just slightly, in the middle, I really enjoyed this. This has a bit of the humor of John Scalzi's Old Man's War, the science of Andy Weir's The Martian and a dash of the action in Dungeon Crawler Carl thrown in. So all in all, a lot of fun and I can't wait to read book two, For We Are Many.