Bobiverse
I like series. Finding an author whose voice clicks and then realizing there is a stack of books still waiting is one of the better feelings in reading. The Bobiverse is off to a strong enough start that books 2 through 5 are already in the to-be-bought or ask-for-as-gifts pile. The series currently stands at five books:
Book 1: We Are Legion (We Are Bob) Book 2: For We Are Many Book 3: All These Worlds Book 4: Heaven’s River Book 5: Not Till We Are Lost
I have only finished the first book, so this is a developing review. The rating can still move. We Are Legion was a quick read. I finished it in a couple of days. The short chapters and the way Taylor moves between different versions of Bob kept the pacing interesting. I locked in hardest on the original Bob. The early stretch where new copies start appearing was the only real point of friction. The chapter titles tell you which version you are with, but I sometimes just kept reading and only realized a few paragraphs in that I had switched characters. Once the pattern settled it stopped being an issue, but it was noticeable at first.
The premise is straightforward: after an Earth-ending event, Bob Johansson (now an AI running a self-replicating probe) starts exploring and copying himself across the galaxy. What stood out more than the exploration itself was how Taylor handles the production side. The book makes a surprisingly grounded case for why advanced 3D printing, and later atomic-level fabrication, would become the dominant way of building almost everything. Looking at where 3D printing sits today, the leap he describes feels plausible inside the science-fiction frame rather than pure hand-waving. The fact that this was written in 2016 makes the idea land even harder.
The other piece that stuck with me was Bob wrestling with identity, whether he was still “Bob,” and what it meant for every future copy to be a derivative of him. That question sits under a lot of the early story without becoming heavy. The humor helps here too. It keeps the book light and fun to read, and it does real work humanizing a character who is no longer human in any traditional sense. On a pure “easy to keep reading” scale this one sits high. I want to keep going. That is the main signal so far.
This is an easy Take My Money to start. The asterisk is the obvious one: I will not know if the series holds until I finish it. Right now the signal is good enough that the rest of the books are already on the list. Whether it stays a Take My Money or settles into Worth A Try will depend on how Taylor handles the expanding cast and the larger story from here.