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M.'s Reviews > Fall; or, Dodge in Hell
Fall; or, Dodge in Hell
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Where have I seen this before...
We Are Legion - We Are Bob (Bobiverse #1) by Dennis E. Taylor
Bob Johansson has just sold his software company and is looking forward to a life of leisure. There are places to go, books to read, and movies to watch. So it's a little unfair when he gets himself killed crossing the street.
Bob wakes up a century later to find that corpsicles have been declared to be without rights, and he is now the property of the state. He has been uploaded into computer hardware and is slated to be the controlling AI in an interstellar probe looking for habitable planets. The stakes are high: no less than the first claim to entire worlds. If he declines the honor, he'll be switched off, and they'll try again with someone else. If he accepts, he becomes a prime target. There are at least three other countries trying to get their own probes launched first, and they play dirty.
The safest place for Bob is in space, heading away from Earth at top speed. Or so he thinks. Because the universe is full of nasties, and trespassers make them mad - very mad.
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January 26, 2019
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Colton
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Apr 04, 2019 09:50AM
I was thinking it sounds more like Bank’s Surface Detail
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Colton wrote: "I was thinking it sounds more like Bank’s Surface Detail"Perhaps. I've made this comparison because I've recently read We Are Legion - We Are Bob
Hrm. I'm noticing that my comment on this review has disappeared. Silly goodreads. Anyway, to reiterate, We Are Legion/We Are Bob is hardly the first book to engage in this conceit.
Something like 50% of the Isekai genre also has this basic plot structure. The devil is in the details, though. Let's see how well he executes. I haven't really liked anything he's put out since the first part of Seveneves.
James wrote: "I haven't really liked anything he's put out since th..." Me neither.
Fair enough, but Shakespeare lifted plots like mad. Here's Tom Eliot - "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." Nothing new under the sun. It ain't what you got, it's how you use it....
Stephen’s appeal isn’t in doing things first. It’s in doing them better.
Considering how the later bobiverse books trailed off into predictable repetition. I'd be willing to give this one a try.
I imagine that, other than the initial premise, Fall or, Dodge in Hell will be altogether a different story and reading experience.
Douglas wrote: "I imagine that, other than the initial premise, Fall or, Dodge in Hell will be altogether a different story and reading experience."I hope so :)
I think there's more William Gibson in here than anything else, really. I've only just started reading, but from what I hear there's a lot of callbacks to the Neuromancer books.
Rob wrote: "I think there's more William Gibson in here than anything else, really. I've only just started reading, but from what I hear there's a lot of callbacks to the Neuromancer books." That sounds good.
NOT WORTH BUYING UNTIL THE PRICE COMES DOWN $17 BUCKS FOR STEPHENSON’S LATEST? Sure can’t take the chance since Stephenson hasn’t written anything really good since the Diamond Age! Keep it on the Kindle but don’t buy!
I had the same thought at first (I loved the Bobiverse), but having finished it I must say they were so different you could arguably say they're not even in the same genre.
Ricardo wrote: "I had the same thought at first (I loved the Bobiverse), but having finished it I must say they were so different you could arguably say they're not even in the same genre."Thanks for the comment. It looks the novel is more interesting than I thought it to be.
See also Greg Egan's Permutation City. Iain Banks's Feersum Endjinn has some of the same elements, particularly a character's [Bascule's] ability to enter the world of code, in part to effect change in the ordinary world because of the accelerated time.
Charlie Houston's Sleepless has a secondary theme involving a scheme to generate income by converting digital treasure in an online game into cash--parallels to Reamde.
Though not technically the same digital environment, the world of literary detection in Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series shares a non-quantum kind of parallel worlds, starting with the narrative of Jane Eyre in The Eyre Affair.
Curt wrote: "See also Greg Egan's Permutation City." Thanks!
Clay wrote: "NOT WORTH BUYING UNTIL THE PRICE COMES DOWN $17 BUCKS FOR STEPHENSON’S LATEST? Sure can’t take the chance since Stephenson hasn’t written anything really good since the Diamond Age! Keep it on the ..."I disagree. ANATHEM is my favorite of his oeuvre.
I had the same reaction!
