I picked up We Are Legion (We Are Bob) hoping for John Scalzi in space. What I got was a technical manual with occasional jokes.
The premise is strong. Bob sells his company, signs up for cryogenic preservation, and promptly gets hit by a car. He wakes more than a century later as a digitized consciousness controlled by a theocratic government that has replaced the United States. They plan to send him into space as an exploratory probe, where he begins creating copies of himself.
Those copies, all versions of Bob with the same memories but gradually different personalities, should be the book’s biggest strength. The idea raises interesting questions about identity, consciousness, and what makes someone an individual.
In practice, most of the Bobs sound exactly alike.
They choose different names and take on different missions, but I often struggled to remember who was where, what they were doing, and where their storyline fell on the timeline. The sameness makes sense because they all began as the same person, but it also makes the book tiring to follow.
The story works best when Taylor focuses on coordination between the Bobs. The battles with the Brazilian probe, the evacuation of Earth, and the effort to build ships for survivors create actual momentum. Then the narrative stops to explain mining operations, printer technology, or manufacturing systems, and the story disappears beneath the machinery.
My larger problem was that I never cared whether any individual Bob survived. They are artificial intelligences who can reproduce themselves. When one is destroyed, several others remain. That weakens the danger. The book wants each Bob to feel like a distinct person, but it does not develop them enough to make their deaths carry much weight.
The humor also depends heavily on the reader’s familiarity with science fiction. Star Trek fans will recognize the Prime Directive references and understand why one Bob names himself Riker. Readers outside that culture may find that many of the jokes pass without landing.
Taylor introduces worthwhile questions about artificial life, personality divergence, political extremism, and humanity’s responsibility toward a digitized consciousness. The book rarely pushes those ideas beyond the clever premise. It spends more time explaining how the technology works than exploring what the technology means.
The ending makes that imbalance worse. The book does not resolve its major conflicts so much as stop and point toward the sequel. I finished because I wanted to see where the story went. The answer was mostly into book two.
The concept held my attention for one book, but not enough to continue the series.