2016 SF, first of what was announced as a trilogy but is now up to
five volumes. Bob Johansson has just sold his software company and is
looking forward to a life of leisure. Then he gets hit by a car. Good
thing he'd signed up for cryonics that morning…
So we're immediately in
fantasy territory, though
somehow I suspect Taylor doesn't think so. But in any case Bob wakes
up to find himself (a) property, (b) a computer program, and (c) with
the choice of running the first interstellar von Neumann probe for the
theocracy that's taken over the USA, or being deleted.
Oh and by the way they casually invented a reactionless drive and a
way to fuel it indefinitely, though they don't seem to have thought of
doing anything else with it.
This is a strange book. It has many of the trappings of science
fiction, but compared with the Good Stuff (the most recent example
I've read being Elizabeth Bear's Machine) it's all very basic.
There really aren't any challenging ideas here. Lots of people have
written about mind uploading, and whether a copy of your personality
record is "really you" (answer: the question is meaningless, either
both things that think they are you "really are" or neither is, but
you can't tell the difference anyway); lots of people have written
about interstellar probes and colonisation. At times it's trying to be
an engineer with a wrench story as Bob casually solves all the
problems he encounters, but it's never interested enough to dig down
into the details.
All right, Taylor doesn't really speak spaceflight. If you are
steadily decelerating in order to come to rest in a target solar
system, suddenly boosting your thrust does not make you arrive
earlier. And if you drop off subcraft behind you, to coast while you
keep decelerating, they will not gradually get further behind you. As
I got further into this book, I got a feeling I last had reading
Ernest Cline's Armada: Bob's science-fictional vocabulary is all
Star Wars and Star Trek, rather than anything a bit more crunchy
and less willing to bend physics for the sake of plot.
But also, all the copies of Bob have divergent personalities, and
nobody cares enough to try to work out why that might be. (And yet
Bob, under various names, is basically the only character here.)
There's an ongoing fight against another von Neumann probe fleet, and
the remnants of humanity on Earth to rescue after they nuked their
planet to uninhabitability, and an early stone age alien race to
mentor, and shiny tech to build and improve, and somehow none of it
ever engaged me. Which it really should have. And to cap it all, the
book just suddenly ends, with basically nothing resolved, not even at
the low level that one expects of the first book of a trilogy.
It's not bad enough to be classed as In Brief Avoid but it left an
aspartame-like taste in my mind and I don't plan to read more in the
series.