Paperback, 320 pages
English language
Published March 10, 2017 by Worldbuilders Press.
Bob Johansson didn’t believe in an afterlife, so waking up after being killed in a car accident was a shock. To add to the surprise, he is now a sentient computer and the controlling intelligence for a Von Neumann probe.
Bob and his copies have been spreading out from Earth for forty years now, looking for habitable planets. But that’s the only part of the plan that’s still in one piece. A system-wide war has killed off 99.9% of the human race; nuclear winter is slowly making the Earth uninhabitable; a radical group wants to finish the job on the remnants of humanity; the Brazilian space probes are still out there, still trying to blow up the competition; And the Bobs have discovered a spacefaring species that considers all other life as food.
Bob left Earth anticipating a life of exploration and blissful solitude. Instead he’s a sky god to …
Bob Johansson didn’t believe in an afterlife, so waking up after being killed in a car accident was a shock. To add to the surprise, he is now a sentient computer and the controlling intelligence for a Von Neumann probe.
Bob and his copies have been spreading out from Earth for forty years now, looking for habitable planets. But that’s the only part of the plan that’s still in one piece. A system-wide war has killed off 99.9% of the human race; nuclear winter is slowly making the Earth uninhabitable; a radical group wants to finish the job on the remnants of humanity; the Brazilian space probes are still out there, still trying to blow up the competition; And the Bobs have discovered a spacefaring species that considers all other life as food.
Bob left Earth anticipating a life of exploration and blissful solitude. Instead he’s a sky god to a primitive native species, the only hope for getting humanity to a new home, and possibly the only thing that can prevent every species in the local sphere ending up as dinner.
What do you do when you're a computer simulation, but everyone you care about is flesh and blood? The people you know are ephemeral, but your love for them is not. You can never be human again, and yet, you care anyway. Perhaps being immortal isn't all it's cracked up to be.
I liked the idea and world building, quick fun read.
Colonization requires splitting the hive. Splitting the hive means a new Prime. A new Prime and another hive means war. This does not benefit us. Better to simply collect resources so that the hive can grow.
For We Are Many is a strong followup to the Bobiverse as it continues to advance the story and maintain an enjoyable level of humour and science fiction.
I am really enjoying this series as Taylor took an intriguing thought experiment and has built a story around exploring that concept. The ramifications of interacting with civilization (against the Prime Directive) and a balance of how much, or how little, intervention is a good thing.
Bobiverse continues to be an easy but engaging read. I find myself asking some very heavy existential questions and am eager to keep on reading.
The premisse of the series is good and the story is well written from a content point of view.
But the author has a problem that continues in this book from book 1, and will probably continue in book 3: The addition of instant communication not being in the books from the start.
The books should have been written in a way that took that in to account, but instead we now end up with chapters that jump backwards and forwards in time, taking little to no account for who is in the chapters.
As an example, there is a series of chapters where you start with Bob-1 getting FTL communication and getting in touch with the others, then a chapter that is a decade+ into the future where Bob-1 is contacted by someone else about a topic, then the very next chapter we are a decade+ back in time …
The premisse of the series is good and the story is well written from a content point of view.
But the author has a problem that continues in this book from book 1, and will probably continue in book 3: The addition of instant communication not being in the books from the start.
The books should have been written in a way that took that in to account, but instead we now end up with chapters that jump backwards and forwards in time, taking little to no account for who is in the chapters.
As an example, there is a series of chapters where you start with Bob-1 getting FTL communication and getting in touch with the others, then a chapter that is a decade+ into the future where Bob-1 is contacted by someone else about a topic, then the very next chapter we are a decade+ back in time again, when Bob-1 just has been connected to FTL comm, making it all a confusing mess to keep track off.
Finished it today after putting it down for a few months. It's loads of fun to read.
It's really good. The series is about the sentience "Bob" which is uploaded into a self-replicating spacecraft and then travels the galaxys, helps the humans, ... etc. I won't go into spoilers here. The topic of "artifical" versus "natural" intelligence plays a major role in the books and "Bob" is confronted with many situations in which he feels very human and/or very computer and/or struggles with the line between the two.
The pacing is very well done. The book overall is well-crafted and VERY WELL RESEARCHED. Yes it's still fiction but I'd say 98%+ of the book is based on real & possible physics.
It's really good. The series is about the sentience "Bob" which is uploaded into a self-replicating spacecraft and then travels the galaxys, helps the humans, ... etc. I won't go into spoilers here. The topic of "artifical" versus "natural" intelligence plays a major role in the books and "Bob" is confronted with many situations in which he feels very human and/or very computer and/or struggles with the line between the two.
The pacing is very well done. The book overall is well-crafted and VERY WELL RESEARCHED. Yes it's still fiction but I'd say 98%+ of the book is based on real & possible physics.
Very good for the second book in the series - the worldbuilding is a bit smoother.
Starting to have a few holes in the story. Mainly if you have total control over VR why do they all still look exactly the same. Still good though
Way too much fun.
Gah, delayed writing the review a bit, and now I've started book 3 and have trouble distinguishing, what happened in which.
My biggest fear after finishing book 1 was that it'd be really hard to follow it up reasonably, either you have to go in exponentially many directions or make the interesting things seam unreasonably small. And the end of the first book showed a tendency to go space-opera-y, action-y, which was not the thing I liked about the first book.
This book does feel a bit like there's probably holes in places, but I'm not staring anywhere for long enough to spot them. And it features an idea I wasn't aware of (mostly because I've never bothered to find out anything about Fermi's paradox).
To be honest, I was entertained in a quite scy-fi-y (exploration of ideas) way. It's no hard sci-fi, I don't think, but it's not space …
Gah, delayed writing the review a bit, and now I've started book 3 and have trouble distinguishing, what happened in which.
My biggest fear after finishing book 1 was that it'd be really hard to follow it up reasonably, either you have to go in exponentially many directions or make the interesting things seam unreasonably small. And the end of the first book showed a tendency to go space-opera-y, action-y, which was not the thing I liked about the first book.
This book does feel a bit like there's probably holes in places, but I'm not staring anywhere for long enough to spot them. And it features an idea I wasn't aware of (mostly because I've never bothered to find out anything about Fermi's paradox).
To be honest, I was entertained in a quite scy-fi-y (exploration of ideas) way. It's no hard sci-fi, I don't think, but it's not space opera either.
Not as good as the first book
Great book! Won't make a lot of sense if you haven't read the first, and it's a great followup anyway.
This series is one of the most original sci-fi series I've read in a while
A fairly breezy book. The main character(s) have a fun personality and I have enjoyed the idea of seeing iterations bring out different aspects of the original. The new species in this book is fun; I hope we get more of them in the final book.
The author introduces some challenging questions and gives them a very light touch. Is our finitude part of what gives us meaning as a person? If saving our species means eradicating another, should we do it? Is life just nasty, brutish, and short?
