ALL THESE WORLDS is the end of our fun tour of the Bobiverse

ALL THESE WORLDS
DENNIS E. TAYLOR (Bobiverse #3)
Worldbuilders Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 ereader platforms, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Being a sentient spaceship really should be more fun. But after spreading out through space for almost a century, Bob and his clones just can't stay out of trouble.

They've created enough colonies so humanity shouldn't go extinct. But political squabbles have a bad habit of dying hard, and the Brazilian probes are still trying to take out the competition. And the Bobs have picked a fight with an older, more powerful species with a large appetite and a short temper.

Still stinging from getting their collective butts kicked in their first encounter with the Others, the Bobs now face the prospect of a decisive final battle to defend Earth and its colonies. But the Bobs are less disciplined than a herd of cats, and some of the younger copies are more concerned with their own local problems than defeating the Others.

Yet salvation may come from an unlikely source. A couple of eighth-generation Bobs have found something out in deep space. All it will take to save the Earth and perhaps all of humanity is for them to get it to Sol — unless the Others arrive first.

REVIEW OF BOOK 1—REVIEW OF BOOK 2

My Review: When the limitations of a single human lifespan are removed from a sentient being's development, what will happen? Will the being go mad, become frozen emotionally, decide to destroy the Universe and see what happens next?

Bob Johansson finds out.

I am jealous of Bob, I am happy Author Taylor decided to write Bob down, and I am all done with the series of novels explaining the Bobiverse. Kinda sorta wish I wasn't but I am, and I think a lot of y'all should pack a Kindle with these three novels and light out for the Bobiverse right quick. The reason is that, in reading the books in order, you'll come to realize that Author Taylor doesn't have a high opinion of the species and still makes a concerted effort to save us. He doesn't consign us to the scrapheap of history with a shrug and a ~meh~.

In this moment of US national history, it's probably more than I'd be able or even willing to do, so it made my days a bit brighter. I'm happy to be jollied along by the greater generosity of a Man with a Plan. And so, I suspect, might other guys be. And I stress the "guys" part—this is a Guy Book in every particular. There are very few female characters and only one, Bridget, is at all developed. Even she is a guy in a woman suit.

Bridget does provide something unique to the Bobiverse...she has a family, kids who grow into beings both like and unlike her. Her relationship with those kids as all the parties age...Bob, in his own way, ages as well...makes for some excellent drama and some astonishing emotional resonances with readers over 50.

I'm also at the point in life where another factor of the Bobiverse, the meditation on personal immortality and the options it provides, is particularly interesting to me. I don't think I'm quite as eager for it at my age as I would have been at Bob's age (31) when he dies. I'm not saying it doesn't have a huge upside. I'm saying that I now feel as well as see the downside, the inevitable losses and griefs piling up under the carpet until the Karastan is basically a blip on the Everest of stuff not dealt with. Author Taylor goes there, as well, and I suspect it's a subject of newfound interest to the intended audience for the book.

The idea of family comes in for some particularly inventive workouts in the Bobiverse. One of the intriguing things about immortality, particularly in Bob's form of multiple "clones" of his conscious mind branching from the moments of separation, is the expanded family sense it offers. Each new generation of Bob-clones is one more removed from Original Biological Bob, then Replicant Bob, then the cloned Bob-minds that cloned Bob-minds that now clone Bob-minds...yet all have perfect digital recall of the "ancestral" Bobs to the moment of their awareness as individuals begins.

Mind-blowing, isn't it? Think on it: generations of sibling-selves with your character! Every facet would be fully explored, of course, like all siblings each unique individual would seek to become different, to distinguish itself from all the others around it. In effect, though the clones would start with certain memories as a base of contact with all the other sibling consciousnesses, as the generations of cloning take place the point of commonality would be deeper and deeper under the sense of personal uniqueness.

It would be fascinating to see this play out! I wanna be in the Bobiverse, dammit!

Except, of course, for the Bobiversal solution to the Fermi Paradox ("where is everybody?"), the Others. A better monster-movie villain I ain't never read. Scary. Don't deny yourself the simultaneous pleasure and fear of experiencing the Bobiverse! Like, now!

FOR WE ARE MANY, second Bobiverse book in a totally geekfest series

FOR WE ARE MANY
DENNIS E. TAYLOR (Bobiverse #2)
Worldbuilders Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 ereader platforms, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Bob Johansson didn't believe in an afterlife, so waking up after being killed in a car accident was a shock. To add to the surprise, he is now a sentient computer and the controlling intelligence for a Von Neumann probe.

Bob and his copies have been spreading out from Earth for 40 years now, looking for habitable planets. But that's the only part of the plan that's still in one piece. A system-wide war has killed off 99.9% of the human race; nuclear winter is slowly making the Earth uninhabitable; a radical group wants to finish the job on the remnants of humanity; the Brazilian space probes are still out there, still trying to blow up the competition; And the Bobs have discovered a spacefaring species that sees all other life as food.

Bob left Earth anticipating a life of exploration and blissful solitude. Instead he's become a sky god to a primitive native species, the only hope for getting humanity to a new home, and possibly the only thing that can prevent every living thing in the local sphere from ending up as dinner.

REVIEW OF BOOK 1—REVIEW OF BOOK 3

My Review: This entry in the three-book series is less of a romp than the first because, of course, because the territory is no longer new or fresh; but it's still a hoot and a holler. I had such a great time going back to the Bobiverse! These books are a pleasure to me because their humor resonates with me:

At times like this, I wondered if I hadn’t gone a little overboard with the level of detail in my virtual-reality environment. There was no reason for me to even have nether regions, let alone for them to pucker.

And that should tell you what you need to know about the suitability of the series to your reading needs. If that neither makes you laugh nor gives you a sense of the subject of the books, best you pass them by.

This installment brings us past the previously known Bobiverse...the bubble of space that Bob's previously created new selves have gone off to explore...and into contact with more new species. There are new threats, new ways of getting the heck rid of old threats, and plenty of the old threats come around again:

I sincerely hoped that in the fullness of time, they’d have the opportunity to get all bent out of shape about environmentalism.

Seems that "intelligence" is a menace...and maybe VEHEMENT had a point. (Bobiversals will get that.) But there's nothing like a replicant on a mission to make the Universe safe for sentient life. The Bobs come through this book without a hint of middle-book-itis. The action doesn't slack. The stakes don't falter. The pace of the book doesn't dilly-dally and the Bobs, bless 'em, don't shilly-shally as they tackle problems on a greater-than-human timescale. I can't spoiler stuff since the Anti-spoiler Activists get so stroppy about it. But I can say that there's no good reason for someone who liked the first book not to get the second ASAP and there's no reason for someone who didn't like the first book to even consider this one.

As for me, I'm on to book three and might even have bumped this one up a rating point had it not been for the clear affection and acceptance herein shamelessly flaunted for a lifeform utterly unworthy of it:

The cat’s A.I. was realistic, right down to the total lack of loyalty.

WE ARE LEGION (WE ARE BOB), amusing way to spend a rainy Sunday afternoon

WE ARE LEGION (WE ARE BOB)
DENNIS E. TAYLOR (Bobiverse #1)
Worldbuilders Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 ereader platforms, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: 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.

REVIEW OF BOOK 2—REVIEW OF BOOK 3

My Review: This is the most male book I've read in ages. I mean, there are two or three women in it but they're onscreen for a hot minute and then gone again. Mostly it's the titular Bob in one of his many regenerated/rebooted/revived selves.

And I think that's why I liked this read so much. It's unapologetic in its geekery.

It blew me away that almost two hundred years after Shatner first famously didn’t actually say, “Beam me up, Scotty,” people still knew Star Trek. Now that’s a franchise.

Bob's a tech bro who cashed out and died at basically the same moment. As a result, Bob's making his early-21st-century geekboy dreams come true by waking up in a theocracy that wants to use him to explore the galaxy...but only because they want to beat the Great Unwashed to any habitable planets there might be out there.

People's capacity for turning dogmatic stupidity into political movements never ceased to amaze me. We've knocked off 99.9% of the human race and somehow the crazies still manage to survive. It just defies the odds.

It defies common sense as well, but that doesn't stop us. I am delighted by this validation of my low opinion of Humanity's sanity. The world Bob wakes up into is very polarized, but things aren't all that different from today. A few changes in the top echelon that are pretty much inevitable anyway. Oh, and...wait, no, discovery is a terrific tease to get the cash register to ring. And Author Taylor deserves your spondulix as much as he does your eyeblinks.

The copyright date on this is 2016. I wish to high heaven that more of y'all had read this tome before the 8th of November.

He and his cronies rammed through far-right policies with no thought for consequences.

That is the sound of Author Taylor predicting accurately the future that is our awful present. I'd ask you to read the book anyway, but really, how can you *not* when the setting precedes the world that it describes?!

Let's say that, for some reason, you're not intrigued by anything I've warbled my fool head off about. You still like to laugh, right?

Belly laughs are one of the best things about being sentient, and you should never miss a chance for one.

Funny and accurate.

Well, that’s double-plus ungood.

Please, please tell me you 1) got the Orwell reference and B) thought it was funny. Let's say you are, for whatever reason, a po-faced old noddycock of a square. Surely you'd like a little snappy thinking as a surfactant for your wet blanket?

Since I doubt, I think; since I think, I exist.

Space exploration was fully living up to my nerd fantasies.

I don’t know why I should be more bothered by the fact of original Bob being dead. Either way, I was a computer program. But somehow, the idea that I was all that was left of Bob felt like being stabbed. I had been—Bob had been—discarded.

If nothing I've mentioned makes you feel the need to splash out a whopping $3.99 on this book, then I pity your spouse/partner. I will say that other criticisms of the book that I've seen bear down heavy on the ending. I'd say they're correct. It doesn't end, it stops; but if you're not amused by it, that won't matter, and if you are, you're going to buy the second one anyway.