I wasn’t entirely sure I was going to continue this series. I picked up the first one as a fluke from a library sale. I was happy enough with it. But I didn’t think it was all that impactful for me.
But as time went on, little bits of the story stuck with me. The seeds took after a while, and I found myself more and more curious as to where the story was going to go. So I broke down, and here we are.
For We Are Many is the second book in the Bobiverse. It follows the main character, Bob, who’s consciousness was uploaded into a Von Neumann probe in the previous book, has the technology ability and smarts to now explore the galaxy at his leisure. However, he has chosen to remain and help humanity through some of the current problems it has currently found itself in.
I wasn’t trying to be mean when I opened by saying that I wasn’t too keen on reading this book. I put it in their for comparison. Because when I finished this one, I almost immediately started the next. That’s a pretty jarring difference between the two. While the first one had much more of a teaser ending, this one seemed to have a full on cliffhanger. But I don’t think that all there was to it. While the first book merely hints at the existence of another sentient species as a threat, this one full on develops it. We also see a worsening of the problems with humanity. To not spoil too much, this book raises the stakes a lot better than anything we got in the expanse series.
At some point I realized that I had forgotten some of the details from the first book. This happens to me fairly frequently, particularly when there is a bit of a gulf between when I finish one book and when I pick up another. But oddly enough, I don’t think it was all that much of a hindrance with this book. For the life of me, I wasn’t sure which of the Bobs was the first Bob. But frankly, I am not sure whether that point really is worth very much. I think in some other book, where the characters were not merely clones of each other, something like that could have made a massive difference.
While reading the first book, I was pretty conscious of the bias I had against it for being something that was self-published. I had lost a lot of that while reading this book. I was happy to read it for what it was, all pretensions aside. I don’t know exactly what the sea change was, but it was likely that fact that it was being buttressed up by the previous book, which was officiating this one.
If that makes any sense.
Failures in Polymathy 