User:Cyberherbalist/sandbox/We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

We Are Legion (We Are Bob) is the first book in the Bobiverse trilogy by Dennis E. Taylor.

Plot
Bob Johansson is a software developer who has just sold his very successful software company to its chief competitor for a lot of money, and is in Las Vegas, Nevada for a science fiction convention. He has also just concluded an agreement with a cryogenics company, to whom he has paid a lot of money to freeze his head for future reanimation in case of his death. Ironically, on the second or third day of the convention Bob manages to get killed on the street by an out of control automobile. He wakes up after 117 years, and finds that he is truly dead, his brain had been destructively scanned, and his personality loaded into computer hardware. In short, he is an artificial intelligence who thinks he is Bob Johannson.

In the century since his death "corpsicles" had been declared truly dead, their financial assets confiscated by the state, and his head turned into the property of a replicant creation company. In short, he is dead, with no rights, and is the property of a company that has "resurrected" him to serve some project that is not immediately identified. When it turns out that if he is successful coping with his new status, he will be used as a von Neumann probe with the mission of exploring other star systems for future colonization, he is ecstatic, being what amounts to a "super nerd."

Characters
Bob Johannson is the viewpoint character, the novel being written in the first person. After Bob begins to clone himself, each new version of him takes a new name. The new names taken by Bob's clones (and later by the clones of the clones) tend to be taken from the pop-culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Two of Bob's first four clones decide upon names taken from the comic strip Bloom County: Bill (from Bill the Cat) and Milo Bloom. The other two are Mario, provenance unknown, and Riker, from Star Trek, although he later transitions to using Will, the Star Trek Riker's first name.

Individual chapters in the book are identified as to which Bob is the primary viewpoint character, and also by date and location. For example, chapter 26 is identified as "26. Riker - April 2157 - Sol".

Non-Bob characters include Dr. Landers, the technician assigned to bring Bob, the new replicant, online, his colleague Dr. Doucette, a replicant competitor (and enemy) Brazilian Empire Major Ernesto Medeiros, and Colonel George Butterworth of the United States of Eurasia Army Corps.

Major Themes
The major themes of the story are space exploration and colonization, but a frequent subtheme is the nature of consciousness and personality. The primary character being a confirmed atheist, the author spends a good deal of time unfavorably portraying religion.

Style
Taylor describes the trilogy as a space opera.

Background
The novel begins in present day (apparently 2010s) Las Vegas, Nevada, during a science-fiction convention. After Bob wakes up as a replicant, 117 years later in 2133, the setting is the former USA, now called Free American Independent Theocratic Hegemony (FAITH), and he is in a laboratory in New Handeltown, the former Portland, Oregon. In 2036 the United States had "elected an over-the-top fundamentalist President named Andrew Handel" who proceeded to enforce policies that led to an economic crisis, the outcome of which led to a coup turning the USA into a theocracy. Criticism of the government is a felony, and the population is subject to re-education if improper thought is expressed in public.

Publication History
The book was released on September 20, 2016 in three formats simultaneously: paperback; Kindle; and audio (Audible).

Reception
The novel's Audible version was named "Audible's Best Sci-Fi Book of 2016", judged "Unique, hilarious, and utterly addictive". As of October 2017 the novel has been rated by over 41,000 readers, with an average rating of 4.7 out of 5.

Adaptations
The Audible audiobook version of the book was released simultaneously with the print and Kindle editions, and is narrated by Ray Porter.