Reddit reviews We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse) (Volume 1)

You have quite the appropriate username. I must warn you that if you're looking for "scary", you might be disappointed. However, because you asked, these are the titles that I can wholeheartedly recommend:

Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville

Naked Lunch by William S Burroughs

Sanatorium under the sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Schulz

Oyasumi Punpun by Inio Asano (translation: "Goodnight Punpun." This one is actually a manga series. If you've never read manga before, check this one out. You won't be disappointed.)

Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky (I have a bit of a personal attachment to this one for reasons that may seem obvious)

Memoirs of my Nervous Illness by Daniel Paul Schreber (This one was recommended by one of my readers, and I'm very glad I added it to the rotation)

Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone

We are Legion by Dennis E. Taylor (a bit of science fiction fantasy that really makes you question the concept of identity)

The Masks of Time by Robert Silverberg

Tales of 1,001 Nights, author(s) unknown

A few other authors and stories I would recommend:
Philip K. Dick;
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler;
Patricia Highsmith;
James Lee Burke;
Jorge Luis Borges;
William Gibson;
Dashiell Hammett;
Haruki Murakami;
Charles Baudelaire;
Ambros Bierce;
Nikolai Gogol;
Alberty Camus;
Nathaniel Hawthorne;
M R James;
H G Wells;
J G Ballard;
Thomas Ligotti;

That's about all I can think of right now, but I think it's a pretty good place to start.

We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Have a look at Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series. Space opera/MilSF, simple narratives.

Incidentally, if you use FTL, you can set the average speed and transit time to whatever is convenient to your narrative.

Excession by Iain Banks is a good look at a post scarcity interstellar society. It's also a good study in plotting and pacing. In a Banks novel you'll generally encounter complex narratives, factions gathering intelligence for most of the book and maneuvering into position, then a big action scene, then the factions regroup and then a big final action scene.

I think you should also look at Martha Wells' Murderbot series. This is a series of novellas, 40K words, but they are basically being marketed as novels, and readers are eating it up. Wells is killing it with this series, and you should study the overall form of the story and the writing style and tone/mood.

Readers are hungry for lighthearted SF now. Not necessarily humorous SF like the Hitchhiker's Guide, though humorous is also popular, but lighthearted enough so that the characters can crack a joke occasionally, or have some running banter in their dialogue. Murderbot is a killer android with a soft side.

I think readers are tired of the doom & gloom of post apoc, and right now the market responds to lighter fare. Other recent examples of this would be We are Legion (We are Bob) and The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. I hesitate in include these two, because I think they are both poorly written, but they are both lighthearted and are super popular right now.

The bobiverse is a trilogy of books where the protagonist dies, and wakes up in the future as a computer program after dying the day he signed up for a cryogenic preservation service. Check out book one, We Are Legion (We are Bob)

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1680680587/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1509816803&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=we+are+legion+we+are+bob

I read the first books of both the Murderbot and the We Are Bob series last week. Both are great, and there are piles of sequels as well.

Over break: The Power by Naomi Alderman. Fabulously thought provoking, so I'm going to assign it to my incoming first year students next fall.

This book.

I was surprised by how much enjoyed it, despite being rather turned away by the blurb.

> “Bahá'u'lláh says you can’t make a distinction between any manifestations of God - Baha'ullah, Mohammad, Jesus, Buddha, the Bob- they all came from the same God,”

Lol, apparently someone is a fan of the Bobiverse.

Edit: Wait a minute... That is from a year before We are Legion was released... Guess they mean JR "Bob" Dobbs.