For We Are Many (Bobiverse Book 2)
✍️ Written by: Dennis E. Taylor
🏷 Genre: Sci-fi / fantasy
🗓 Published: 18th April 2017
📄 Pages: 321
🧐 My rating: ★★★★☆ / 4 stars
Bob and his copies have been spreading out from Earth for 40 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 sees all other life as food.
Bob left Earth anticipating a life of exploration and blissful solitude. Instead he’s become 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 living thing in the local sphere from ending up as dinner.
I continue to really enjoy the Bobiverse series and I’m becoming more engaged with the characters. When I first started reading Bobiverse, with one person was cloning himself left, right and centre, I thought it might get a bit repetitive. But it hasn’t yet.
Taylor manages to give each Bob their own identity and nuance. He does this by the use of forcing every new Bob to pick a new name, and cleverly focussing on how the different Bob’s appear to demonstrate exaggerated traits from original Bob’s personality. This results in having very different Bobs, but it does make the inter-mingling storylines difficult to follow aa the Bobiverse grows. Especially since there are like 25 Bobs by the end of this book.
Bob-1, the original artificial Bob, spends most of this book being somewhat of a God to a sentient civilisation he dubbed The Deltans. For me, this and relocating the inhabitants of Earth to other systems, are the best storylines in the book.
Then there’s the storyline of The Others; the main antagonists in this book. Honestly, I’ve felt a little let down by this story so far. The Others feel like a mashup between The Borg from Star Trek and The Vogons from Hitchhiker’s Guide.
Because of this, the storyline felt a little unoriginal to me, but it wasn’t a deal-breaker and only marginally impacted what was a great book. Plus, I think there’s way more to come from The Others in the next book.
No doubt I’ll be writing about that soon, so watch this space!