Book Report: Bobiverse books 1-4

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The Bobiverse is a science fiction book series by Dennis Taylor, so far consisting of four books: We Are Legion, For We Are Many, All These Worlds, and Heaven’s River. The first three form sort of one big story, and the fourth one feels like a more self-contained sequel (and is quite a bit longer than the first three). They feel very much like classic science fiction of the sort published in the 80‘s and 90’s, the sort I read growing up... and that’s both a good thing and a frustrating thing.

The main character of the books is Bob Johanssen, a programmer whose brain was frozen in the early 21st century, and subsequently had his brain scanned and mind reinstantiated in a computer a century later, in a world much different from the one he left. By the 2100s, the US has become a theocracy, and scans are seen as useful property rather than people (since by doctrine they don’t have souls). There’s a small business in finding scans who are useful for various jobs, and putting them to work. This is a pretty horrifying prospect when you think about it deeply, since most of the jobs end up relatively menial, and it gets worse when it turns out that most scans end up not being long-term viable, basically going insane after a short time. Bob ends up both skilled and lucky; he stays together (which the book attributes largely to his curiousity and technical mindset) and then he’s put to work as the central intelligence of a space-exploring Von Neumann probe project. Throughout the following books, Bob builds space infrastructure, makes copies of himself to help explore, founds colonies, fights off threats,a nd saves humanity and other sentient species.

In short, the books are classic sci-fi competence porn; lots of details of what the Bobs do and how they do it, somewhat episodic in terms of discovering a problem, working out solutions, sometimes dealing with complications or outright failures, but always working out something at least somewhat satisfying. This makes it very fun and engaging to read, but there are a lot of ways in which the book feels pretty limited.

As much as Taylor is interested in working out a lot of the little details of things like space battles, colonization, megastructures, and the interactions of different technology levels, the books don’t do much to dig deeper. It’s probably not a surprise that the author himself is a former programmer, and the character of Bob is very into science fiction and other typical geeky pursuits. I don't mean any of this as a dig; there's lots of interesting stuff that can be done with a self-insert, and I'm not above enjoying a big pile of nerdy references.

What is really evident though is an author who's never really had to reach beyond that. Even though they are all posthuman spaceships, untethered from the limits of human bodies or needs, no Bob seems very interested in exploring that. They all present as pretty similar to the original Bob, and when some end up drifting in less-Bob-like ways, that's viewed initially with suspicion, and never with much interest or curiosity. There's never really any serious thought put to what it means to be a person copied from another person, undergoing individuation, nor to how someone like that could intentionally explire other identities. Bobs who use their capabilities to explore fantasy and roleplay are similarly viewed as curiosities, even though those explorations don't really seem to get past Star Trek or D&D. There's the same sort of feeling in the worldbuilding; humans stay human, aliens are portrayed as fairly human as well, and when they have quirks, they often seem to be viewed from a sort of human-centric remove.

Again, none of this is to say I didn't enjoy the books. I read them all in a row, as fast as I've read pretty much anything. They're fun, and engrossing, and clever. But there were so many points I wished they'd be something more than that. When I started thinking through what I was going to read this year, the first things on my plate were two recommendations from friends, the Bobiverse series and the Post-Self series. I was worried a bit about reading them in a row. Two SF series featuring societies of uploaded people with a lot of focus on copying oneself? I was worried it would get samey. But now I'm very eager to read the series written by the queer furry, not just for the sake of the contrast, but also because I expect it to show a sort of digital identity that I actually recognize.