[Book Review]: We Are Legion, We Are Bob
Silly fun science fiction with an accidental digression into sociology
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) is a book by Dennis E. Taylor. Light science fiction for those who enjoy that type of thing. It’s the first book of what is now a 5 book series. While the series itself is best described as dumb fun science fiction. One could also make the argument that it is the conceited power fantasy of an ignoble author. Dennis Taylor wrote the book more as an experiment in ideas. A sort of "come look what I thought of" mashup of hard science fiction from an author relatively familiar with the scientific basis for the ideas he wants to explore. The series is legitimate fun to read, but doesn't have very much deep-thought in its text.
The premise is simple: a brilliant shut-in programmer named "Bob" at his peak somewhere around the mid 2000s contracts with a company to preserve his brain in liquid nitrogen if anything happens to him. He dies within a few hours of the arrangement being signed. A few hundred years later, he is "resurrected" as a digital consciousness to govern a Von Neuman probe designed to go out into the galaxy and explore it. He escapes extreme political instability on earth, goes out into the black and starts building copies of himself to begin the exploration. As said above: fun dumb science fiction as a power fantasy. At the same time, it doesn't shy away from more interesting topics in the same way that Star Trek didn't. Instead of focusing on sociology, however, it focuses on engineering and physics. The entire series takes place with travel being below the speed of light meaning that (at least initially) communications delays and long-distance-trips take real decades of time. When a few copies of Bob return to earth to see how things are going (one of the first things some of the Bobs do in the first book) decades have passed on earth, and he's even more out of his element.
The whole series is steeped in neoliberal egalitarianism to a fault. Flimsy caricatures of "Christian extremists" make up some of the early antagonists in the series. The first book was published in 2016, and the author had probably been working on it since 2012. It definitely shows. The author approaches philosophy and sociology with all the nuance of a sledge-hammer crafting simple easy-to-hate villains. That's because the real focus of the series is on the physics, not the society. However, by focusing on the science and ignoring sociological implications in the initial book of the series, the book series itself contains some fascinating metacontextual discussions over its long run-time.
The series has been running now for nearly a decade through some of the most contentious social disruptions in the last half-century. What's fascinating about the metacontext of the story(s) is that the author seems to recognize this. By the fourth and fifth book, the author (and the characters by-proxy) are forced to give up on neoliberal totalitarianism as a guiding ideology. The "heroes" still hold simple egalitarian ideals, but they're forced to recognize that those ideals can't apply between fundamentally different societies. Likewise, their attempts to force those ideals onto disparate groups start falling flat a lot more in the later books.
The Bobiverse series is a series of fund dumb science fiction books that also chart an author coming to terms with the idea that his view of society and morality is fundamentally wrong. The plotlines in the books (particularly after book 2) result in the author having effectively painted himself into a corner. His once hardline positions on "right" and "wrong" become more complex as the number of Bobs in the series goes from one to hundreds and from hundreds to thousands. Many with mutually-exclusive ideas on what is 'right' and what is 'wrong.' The book series (being focused on fun technology and not sociology) doesn't shy away from these questions. Rather they become set dressing. At no point does the author fall into moral relativism, and the author does understand that force and coercion are requirements to order societies at large scales.
It's a fascinating lens through which one can view the change in attitude that's happened during the first quarter of the 20th century when it comes to people. Through the characters and plotlines one can see the growth in distrust of digital systems, not for silly reasons (god says no!) but for very real reasons (they're devaluing human life). One can see that what's viewed as a simple society of rules is really one of force where unenforced rules don't exist. The author persists in his neoliberal mindset, but the gaps in it are laid bare in the text of the stories of Bob.
The stories themselves are also fun if you're into that kind of thing. One could argue that this is a science fiction series that doesn't require too much complex thought. If you're looking for a dumb fun light science fiction series to read through for fun (or listen to on the plane) during the holidays, you could do a lot worse. It isn't meant to be examined too closely... maybe that's the reason that when it is examined closely, and one reads the ideology of the author into the text, there's a fair quantity to unpack. There won't be a whole lot of essay's written about these books, but they're fun to read, and the fact that they don't try to unpack bigger ideas means the base-assumptions of the author inherent in the text can be analyzed more completely than would otherwise be possible.
Have fun every one and Merry Christmas.
The most important line in book 4, to me, was "I had been a committed humanist my whole life. Was I now going to be forced to accept the existence of the soul?" From Bob 1. This really showcases that Dennis, the author, is grappling with his old beliefs outside the series, as spoken through the voice of his self-insert.
I love that series.