We Are Legion

Bob Johansson signs the cryonics paperwork, steps off a kerb, and wakes up a century later as government property with no body and one job, and Taylor's 2016 debut turns that nightmare into the genre's most cheerful engineering epic. The desk notes the trick up front. The horror is real and the voice refuses it, and the refusal is the book.

The premise, audited: what if you woke up as your own spaceship, and the job came with a copy machine? Bob is installed as the mind of a Von Neumann probe, a self-replicating explorer, and launched into a sky that several other nations' probes also want. The replication is where the novel finds its actual subject, because each copy of Bob drifts. Riker is duty. Homer is jokes. Bill is research. The Bobs are one man refracted into a personality spectrum, and the book's quiet question, asked while asteroids are being smelted, is which of them is still him, and whether the question means anything. The nomenclature helps the comedy along, every new Bob naming himself for a fictional hero and then failing to live up to the reference, which is self-knowledge arriving by version number.

What the desk admires is the competence pitched at hobby temperature. Terraforming, orbital mechanics, autofactories, all narrated in the register of a man delighted to finally have the budget for his projects, and the delight is contagious in a way the field's grimmer post-human fiction never manages. Meanwhile Earth, fractious and dying behind him, keeps radioing demands, and the Deltans, a stone-age species one Bob adopts, pull the story into questions of stewardship it handles with more care than its jokes advertise. The gorilloids alone, the Deltans' predators, receive better ecological reasoning than most alien apex species are granted. The Deltan thread's costs stay sealed, as does every conflict resolution among the probes.

The load-bearing science is replication logistics and signal lag, both kept honest, and the delay on the mirror is measured in job titles. A man becomes his outputs, distributed, versioned, and arguing with himself, and half the desk's readership does that professionally already.

Verdict on the premise's bill. Paid, in copies, with the change counted honestly.

Honest notices: humanity's near-extinction as backdrop, a stone-age culture's dangers rendered plainly, physics infodumps served with enthusiasm, and a breeziness about death that is the coping mechanism under examination. The sequels widen everything; this volume completes its own arc.

Who is this for? Engineers who read at lunch, Martian graduates wanting scale, anyone who has forked a project and watched the forks disagree. The desk assigns it as the genre's happiest book about dying.