I picked up We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor hoping for John Scalzi in space. What I got was a tech manual with occasional jokes. Look, I love Scalzi’s blend of smart-ass humor and actual storytelling. This book has the smart-ass part down, especially if you’re a Trekkie who’ll catch every Prime Directive reference and appreciate that one of the main characters names himself Riker. But where Scalzi keeps the technical stuff as backdrop to character and plot, Taylor seems more interested in explaining how his fictional 3D printers and mining facilities work than making me care about anything happening.
The premise is solid: Bob sells his company, signs up for cryogenic freezing, and immediately gets hit by a car. He wakes up 100+ years later as an AI in a computer, uploaded by a theocratic USA government that now controls what used to be America. They’re sending him into space for exploration, and once he’s out there, he starts replicating himself. Multiple Bob clones, each developing slightly different personalities from the same base memories.
That clone concept is the book’s biggest strength and also where it falls apart for me. Yes, watching one person’s personality fracture into different versions based on their experiences is interesting in theory. In practice? I couldn’t tell most of the Bobs apart unless they had different names attached. They all sounded like the same guy, which I guess makes sense since they literally are, but it made tracking who was doing what exhausting. Add in the fact that they’re spread across the universe at different points in time, and I spent half the book trying to figure out which Bob was where and when.
The coordination between the Bobs works well when Taylor focuses on it. The space battles with the Brazilian ship, the logistics of evacuating Earth after nuclear winter, building ships for the survivors, that stuff moves. But then he’ll spend paragraphs explaining printer technology and mining operations, and I’d lose the thread entirely. The technical talk overwhelms the story.
Here’s my real problem: I didn’t care if any of the Bobs died. They’re AI ships. If one exploded in space, okay, there are seventeen more. That sounds harsh, but when your protagonist is infinitely replicable, stakes get fuzzy. The book wants me to feel something about Bob’s connection to humanity, especially when he returns to Earth and sees people struggling to survive. The emotion is there in concept but not in execution.
The humor lands if you’re already deep in sci-fi culture. If you’re not, you’ll miss half the references and the jokes won’t hit the same way. There’s snarky commentary throughout, but it’s not enough to carry the book when the plot gets bogged down in worldbuilding details.
Taylor took a risk exploring AI cloning and personality divergence in a way I haven’t seen before (though I don’t read tons of space opera, so maybe this is more common than I know). The book sets up interesting questions about what makes someone human, what happens when politics overrides scientific progress, and whether preserved consciousness in AI form still counts as life worth protecting. But it’s more interested in being clever about those concepts than actually exploring them with any depth.
The book ends on a cliffhanger, clearly setting up the series for more. I finished it mainly to see how it resolved, and now I know: it doesn’t really. It just stops and expects you to pick up book two.
Who this is for: Hardcore sci-fi fans who love technical worldbuilding and don’t mind tracking multiple versions of the same character across different timelines. Star Trek fans who’ll appreciate the constant references. People who want their space opera heavy on the “opera” part with lots of moving pieces.
Who this isn’t for: Anyone wanting character-driven sci-fi. Readers who get lost in technical explanations. People hoping for Scalzi-style humor with actual emotional stakes. Anyone who needs to care about whether the protagonist lives or dies.
I’m not continuing the series. The concept was interesting enough for one book, but not enough to commit to more of the same.
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