We Are Legion – We Are Bob (Bobiverse #1)
Rating: 3/5, average
Oy. Here we go again… another scifi new release that I would never have picked up if it weren’t for our science fiction book club. 😛
The strongest part of the Bobiverse series is the science. The fiction part is a little weak, but if you’re coming to science fiction looking for real interesting science, this series might have something for you.
The Bobiverse series is about a CEO (Bob) who pays to have himself cryogenically frozen after his death (so that he can be revived in the future when medicine has advanced to the point of making people immortal). What he doesn’t expect is that, by freak accident, he will die just after signing on the dotted line. When he is revived in the future, it’s not in a meat-body, but as an AI residing in a computer.
There are some really fun scenes of Bob getting used to being a computer program. Since he doesn’t have a physical brain anymore, he can’t feel emotions like he used to, and the knowledge that everyone he knew in the past is dead by now doesn’t arouse the same grief it would have when he was still physically alive. Bob learns how to control a small robots, then is put into a spaceship and becomes a Von Neumann probe, a spacecraft designed to self-replicate with materials it finds in space.
Bob floats through the universe, making mini-mes, fighting evil Brazilians, and aiding the evolution of an alien species. I think the story breaks its own world a little bit by making each Bob created have a fairly different personality from the original Bob—one is strict, one is silly, one is silent, one is a scientist (well, they’re all scientists, but one is especially focused on R&D). If we’re being completely logical here, they should all be the same since they’re copied from the same data, but apparently there’s a little ghost in the machine just to keep things interesting (maybe a little RNG?).
The future politics are very interesting and tongue-in-cheek. The United States has become a Christian theocracy called FAITH (Free American Independent Theocratic Hegemony). FAITH, unfortunately, is the current owner of Bob as part of project HEAVEN (Habitable Earths Abiogenic Vessel Exploration Network). Bob’s mission is to find habitable planets for FAITH to send colonists to if nuclear war erupts and makes Earth uninhabitable (which it does, later on). The Brazilian Empire is the foreign country that proves to be the biggest problem for Bob as the competing probes they send out are the most aggressive (most of the interstellar fight scenes are Bob vs the Brazilian AI).
About three-quarters of the way though, Bob finds a habitable planet with sentient alien life on it. The creatures on it are described as gorilla-like, and their society is a fairly primitive sticks-and-stones affair. Bob takes a shine to one young alien boy who likes to create inventions and reminds him of himself when he was young. Bob helps him invent stronger weapons to fend off predators so the gorilla-like people can survive. I kind of liked this part of the book as it had a little more warmth and variety of characters, but it felt very self-congratulatory. Bob is obviously a stand-in for the author, and the inventive gorilla-like alien is obviously a stand-in for Bob, so when we’re being told how great that one genius alien is, it feels like author saying, “Yeah, nerds (implicit: white men) are the best! Everyone else can SUCK IT!!!”
It also bothered me a little bit that it’s just that one alien who is bright enough to create things while all the other aliens are purportedly sitting around staring at the wall. It ties in to the “Great Man Theory” of history, which is generally rejected by academics in favor of the theory that environmental forces shape social movements. The entitled white-male attitude here is thick enough to suffocate.
In sum, this book had good ideas, but I wish it wasn’t so overwhelmingly white-male-centric. I’ll grant that it’s a little hard to avoid that in situations with only one character. This book was very much like Andy Weir’s The Martian: most of the time there’s only one white-male character, alone, in space, making off-color jokes to himself. These books are less painful to read than when a white-male writer tries to write women or PoC fails, but it feels limited and safe… I relate to the protagonist a little, but I can’t relate to him entirely because in his mind, he wouldn’t see me as fully a person. In order to align myself with the main character’s perspective, I would have to sacrifice some self-esteem.
Even though I see these kind of books often advertised as “fun”, they’re usually a slog for me. It’s not only that the scientific ideas are hard to grasp, it’s that when I read them I have to go a long time without encountering any characters I can relate to to ground them in human experience. The difference is like between a march with strangers and a long hike with friends. There’s the same distance to cover, but when you’re with friends, it takes your mind off your feet hurting and you feel like you get there faster.
I’ve been part of my scifi club for a number of years now, and I’ve gotten better at telling before I start a book if it’s going to be a white-male circlejerk so I can avoid it. I’m now much more interested in reading scifi by women writers or people of color, not so much because I want to make a political statement (though I’m not opposed to that), but because I just got bored of reading the same narrow perspective over and over.
I kind of knew with this one it would go down an uncomfortable path, partly from the plot description, partly from the generic name Bob, but mostly from the way Bob sees his ex-wife as a nagging shrew at the beginning and the sustained lack of women as anything but mothers or sex objects throughout the rest of the book.
I persisted with this one, but I know I’m skipping the next book club read, Andy Weir’s Artemis, which I’ve heard some negative things about from women on BookTube (that it’s about a Saudi Arabian teenage girl and that the author seems out-of-touch about both Arab culture and young women’s perspectives).
If you’re a man but you want to write about women (or write a story that doesn’t conspicuously exclude them), I think it’s vital to:
- Read books by women/PoC. Maybe set a goal of reading 5 books featuring characters of the race, ethnicity, and age you want to write (preferably by writers of that sex or ethnicity). Maybe 1 by a white woman, 1 by a black woman, 1 by an Asian woman, 1 by a Latina, 1 by a Middle Eastern woman, and 1 by an Indian woman. Obviously that’s not going to teach you everything you need to know about being a woman or minority, but it’s a good first step. Also, a lot of books by women/minorities that get awards and become famous are those with a darker outlook (like The Vegetarian and Eileen, even though they’re fantastic, they’re quite depressing), so if you can find some comedies or lighter books you might want to check those out as well to get a wider picture and not come away thinking being a woman/minority is all doom and gloom. So maybe 1 light and 1 dark from a woman of each ethnicity.
- Get your manuscript edited or looked over by a woman/PoC. Look up “sensitivity reading” and hire someone to give it a pass over and point out places where your characters say or do unrealistic things.
Yeah, so, Bobiverse is average. You may or may not enjoy it. Come for the interesting scientific ideas, leave because of the myopic worldview.
And I might do a Diverse Reading Challenge list for my next post… stay tuned!
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