#40 in Science fiction
We Are Legion (We Are Bob)
- 381
- Pages
- about 7 h
- Reading time
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Our view
A light, joke-filled space adventure with an appealing premise: a software entrepreneur wakes a century after his death as the mind of an interstellar probe. Its pleasure lies in watching problems get solved one by one. Some readers feel that same quality as a limit: for them the planning and logistics crowd out the story. For readers who enjoy engineering puzzles and pop-culture nods; first of six.
Worth knowing Bob Johansson sells his software company, signs up to have his head frozen when he dies, and is killed crossing the street the next day; he wakes up more than a century later as a computer, the property of a theocratic American state, and is told he has been chosen to pilot a self-replicating probe to the nearest stars. The rest of We Are Legion, from 2016, is Bob doing exactly that: building copies of himself who each drift into a slightly different personality, exploring systems, meeting the one alien species and watching what is left of Earth from a distance. Dennis E. Taylor self-published it and the audiobook made it; the Bobiverse reached a fifth book in 2024. The jokes are engineer’s jokes and the science is mostly right. About 300 pages, and the series is read in order.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
Bob Johansson has just sold his software company and is looking forward to a life of leisure. There are places to go, books to read, and movies to watch. So it's a little unfair when he gets himself killed crossing the street.Bob wakes up a century later to find that corpsicles have been declared to be without rights, and he is now the property of the state. He has been uploaded into computer hardware and is slated to be the controlling AI in an interstellar probe looking for habitable planets. The stakes are high: no less than the first claim to entire worlds. If he declines the honor, he'll be switched off, and they'll try again with someone else. If he accepts, he becomes a prime target. There are at least three other countries trying to get their own probes launched first, and they play dirty.The safest place for Bob is in space, heading away from Earth at top speed. Or so he thinks. Because the universe is full of nasties, and trespassers make them mad - very mad.
Reading order · Bobiverse
Full order & progress →- We Are Legion (We Are Bob)This book
8.48.4 / 10 - For We Are Many
8.58.5 / 10 - All These Worlds
8.68.6 / 10 - Heaven's River
8.28.2 / 10 - Not Till We Are Lost
8.28.2 / 10 - The Infinite Extent
8.08.0 / 10
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.5 across 1,819 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 93% of the weight and the score stays at 8.4 — the Science fiction average of 7.8 barely moves it.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.2 | 19 | 1% |
| Hardcover | 8.5 | 1.8K | 99% |
Frequently asked
How long is We Are Legion (We Are Bob)?
It has 381 pages — shorter than 66% of the ranked books in Science fiction.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
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