Paperback, 382 pages
English language
Published Oct. 20, 2016 by Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency.
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 …
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.
An incredible space story starting in a Dystopian future Earth. A few twists here and there, and certainly looked forward to seeing what happened in between breaks. Each chapter left you wanting more.
Ended quite abruptly though, but makes sense as there are more of them in the series.
I enjoyed a lot of the planet exploration and Von Neumann aspects of the story. But even as a white guy it was kind of painful how little mention women got in this book. And Bob’s past is just… vague and generic and he responds heroically but predictably to the challenges thrown at him.
Like I don’t feel you will waste your time reading this, but I feel people should go in with their eyes open to just how generic the characters and characterizations are, even while the exploration of some of the scientific ideas is quite cool. Also, I feel zero urge to read any of the sequels.
