Some years ago I did post reviewing Dennis E. Taylor’s Bobiverse series. In the first book, Bob Johansson wakes up in the future to discover that he died but that his mind was uploaded into a computer. He’s forced into being the control system for a Von Neumann probe, a self replicating interstellar craft.
Being a computer engineer, he eventually hacks his control system and is able to take control of his own destiny. The early parts of the story are him replicating and his replicants exploring the nearby star systems. Eventually some of them return to Earth to help a humanity ravaged by destructive wars to avoid extinction. They also encounter multiple alien species, some of which they help, but they end up having to fight one that represents an existential threat.
The narrative is all first person. Each chapter is narrated by a particular Bob replicant. Each replicant is a little different. It’s implied that this is due to quantum fluctuations leading to inevitable differences between them. The result is that each individual replicant can be in physical jeopardy and possibly die.
So these aren’t super hard science fiction. There’s no FTL (faster than light) travel. The probes take years to travel between stars. But the propulsion system of the probes amounts to magic, allowing the story to progress without a huge part of it being about energy issues. And we eventually get FTL communication, allowing the Bobiverse to form an interactive community.
In one of the earlier books, a replicant named Bender decided to take off and explore. He heads off in a particular direction. But after a certain point he ceases communicating. In Heaven’s River, the fourth book of the series, which I just recently reading, Bob, the original replicant, decides it’s time to go looking for Bender.
But Bob’s search is done against a backdrop of a changing Bobiverse. The variations in the replicants, “replicative drift”, have been adding up as the Bobs continue multiplying. The result is that many of the replicants are increasingly less like the original Bob, with different attitudes. A particularly contentious subject is in how the Bobs should relate to humanity and other biological species, with one faction, calling itself “Starfleet”, in reference to the Star Trek Prime Directive concept, advocating for complete isolation from biologicals. These disagreements eventually escalate into a civil war.
One of the factions, the “Skippies”, is interested in building a true AI, which in this universe has not yet been accomplished, despite mind uploading being an increasingly prevalent technology. In their research, the Skippies have discovered that it is in fact possible to make a perfect copy of a mind, but that as soon as it is activated, differences will emerge between the copy and original. Unless the original mind is kept inactive. If it is, the new mind is exactly the same as the original. If the original is subsequently activated, it will become altered.
The Skippies don’t understand why, although quantum entanglement is raised as a possibility. (Of course, quantum entanglement doesn’t really work like this. As noted above, this isn’t the hardest of science fiction.) There’s also speculation that if the quantum No-Cloning theorem is what prevents a running Bob from being a perfect replicant, maybe the No-Deletions theorem means a mind never truly dies, raising the possibility of an afterlife.
There ends up being two story level upshots to this. One is that the initial Bob replicant is probably an accurate copy of the original biological Bob Johansson’s mind. The second is that it’s possible to transmit and instantiate a mind in a new location with fidelity as long as the original isn’t running. (This ends up feeling a bit like the way minds work in the Ghost in the Shell franchise.)
But all of this is a backdrop to the main star of the book, a discovered megastructure of a type I hadn’t heard of before. There are a bunch of megastructures in science fiction, with Dyson spheres being the most prevalent. But there are also ringworlds, as explored by Larry Niven, orbitals, as explored by Iain Banks, and a number of others. This book features a topopolis.
A topopolis turns out to be similar to an O’Neill cylinder, a space habitat in the shape of a cylinder, which provides artificial gravity by spinning along its axis. But a topopolis is much longer, typically hundreds of millions, or even billions of kilometers long, often envisioned as repeatedly looping around a star. The one in Heaven’s River is segmented, so that each segment rotates independently, but with links between the segments allowing travel between them.
It’s difficult to say much more without getting into spoilers. But the book ends up being a sort of quest like story happening in one thread, while a full on civil war (mostly virtual) happens in another. Eventually the two threads end up being related to each other in unexpected ways.
So there are a lot of concepts going on in this book. I enjoyed and highly recommend it. But as usual, it’s probably best to start at the beginning of the series. In fact, one of my nits with this book was in how much it assumes the reader remembers from the earlier books. I read them years ago, and so often didn’t remember many of the earlier events, concepts, and technologies referred to in this one.
I actually had bought this particular book a couple of years ago, but hadn’t gotten around to reading it until now. Part of what finally spurred me was learning that a fifth book will be coming out soon. Hopefully I won’t wait as long to read the new one.
Anyway, Taylor’s writing style is pretty comfortable. If the concepts described sound enticing, I recommend checking out his series. I also read another novel of his some years ago, The Singularity Trap, but never got around to reviewing it for some reason. It’s not as broad in scope as the Bobiverse books, but also well worth checking out.
Have you read any of his stuff? If so, what did you think? Or what do you think about any of the concepts described here?
SelfAwarePatterns 
Sounds like a series I would have enjoyed in my youth.
O’Neill Cylinders are curious things. I explored writing about one in a short scene/story last year. https://davecline.wordpress.com/2022/05/09/short-story-cylinder-sf-space/
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That scene seemed very familiar. You must have linked to it before, although maybe on your other blog, or from it.
The wobble issue is rarely addressed in sci-fi. And of course it exists on a much larger (and catastrophic) scale with any megastructure that’s supposed to encircle a star. Larry Niven had to add stabilizing thrusters to ringworld in his sequel, after huge swathes of fandom pointed out the issue. (It’s been decades, but I don’t recall him addressing where those thrusters got their fuel / energy.)
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Aw, you’re right. I suppose I linked from anonymole. Sorry.
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No worries. I didn’t mind reading it again.
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Nice review. Sometimes I wish I could self-replicate to tackle chores around the house. Of course, then all the Tinas would start criticizing each other’s work.
Sounds like a fun and funny premise for a story, a universe of different versions of oneself.
I read somewhere that the long narrative arcs of genre fiction such as Sci-Fi is intended to mirror streaming platforms where people often binge watch their favorite shows. There’s a great deal of writing advice out there which has to do with pumping out content, and I suppose it works in certain genres, but I also hear readers complain about finishing a book and not getting a proper ending (or in your case, not getting enough of a recap to dive into the next book). I wonder how well and to what extent the TV streaming-to-book-serialization analogy holds. I know I’d find it super irritating to not get a full narrative arc in a single book, so much so that I wouldn’t continue reading the other books in the series or by the same author. That said, I haven’t read a single book like that, so maybe I’m just not the audience anyway.
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Thanks. Yeah, I think the Bob’s get along much better than a bunch of Mike’s would. But even if they started out as perfect clones, there’s no memory sharing mechanism in this universe, so their experiences would eventually cause them to drift apart and eventually conflict would be there. But the idea of a civil war between replicas has shown up in some other fiction, like Ann Leckie’s Ancillary books.
The arcs for these books are okay. My big issue was there could have been more rehash of the previous books at the beginning. It’s kind of ironic, because I’ve complained about that in other book series, where the author feels the need to rehash things constantly. Finding a sweet middle ground on this is probably harder than it looks, and there probably isn’t one that will satisfy everyone. Once in a book does it for me, but once every hundred pages feels excessive. (Although someone who reads slow might feel different.)
The same is true, I think, for the arcs. You want each book to be satisfying, but if it’s a series, there always needs to be something left over at the end. The trick seems to be making the ending where it could serve as the finale if somewhere stopped there, but where there’s still room for sequels. I’ve seen authors gets this spectacularly wrong. They usually end up feeling it in their Amazon reviews. Again, getting it right is probably a lot harder than it looks. The Expanse books mostly did get it right, and I paid attention to how they did it. Only a couple ended on outright cliffhangers, and they were pretty deep in the series, so readers by then were likely committed anyway.
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“But even if they started out as perfect clones, there’s no memory sharing mechanism in this universe, so their experiences would eventually cause them to drift apart and eventually conflict would be there”
That makes for an interesting nature/nurture experiment. There could be variations on the experiment too, like clones raised in different households, some poor, some wealthy, some religious, some not, some given freedom, some given strict parents, etc. I’m sure that’s been done too, given how popular the clone concept is.
For me a satisfying ending would mean tying up the major conflict and answering a few of the more prominent questions raised, but even in standalone novels I don’t mind having a few loose ends or some degree of ambiguity. Cliffhangers would drive me nuts. Maybe I’m just not used to that sort of thing, but when I close the book, I want to feel that sense of finality. I wonder if book series nowadays have the same problem that TV series so often do of running out of steam at some point, yet continuing anyway. (You might have noticed I don’t read them much, or at all really. The only ‘series’ I can think of that I’ve read was the Lord of the Rings.)
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On nature vs nurture, there’s the phenomena of identical twins separated at birth being much more like each other than twins raised together. (At least that’s the common claim.) If true, it might mean that minds copied but still in contact with each other would probably diverge more than minds who go separate paths. Although I would think that would depend on just how different or similar the paths might be.
On a satisfying endings, I think a lot depends on what the promise was in the first act. For example, in the original Star Wars movie, the Death Star plans, and the Death Star itself, are set up as the chief center of conflict. So the ending where the plans are used to destroy it is satisfying. Darth Vader is there throughout, but it’s less about him, so him escaping at the end doesn’t feel like a letdown. (It might actually have felt like a letdown if such an interesting character had died in that movie without the promise of us learning more.)
Interestingly, Lord of the Rings isn’t considered a series. It was originally one book that the publisher broke up due to physical book limitations. So even though the early promises are about the Shire and the ring, it’s okay that those don’t get resolved in the first book, because that book is not a complete story. That does require readers understanding what they’re getting into. (I know someone who was angry after seeing the first movie, saying “It just ended”, not realizing two more movies were coming.) It also really needs to all be published together, or soon after each other. George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire is one long story, but several years are passing between each book coming out, which Martin takes a lot of grief for.
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“minds copied but still in contact with each other would probably diverge more than minds who go separate paths”
Funny, but I can see that. The last thing kids want is to be like their siblings.
“I think a lot depends on what the promise was in the first act.”
Definitely. That big thematic question really can’t be left hanging. The setup is so important. And it’s actually not as hard as one might think to reverse engineer that setup to make it fit the ending you want, so long as the setup is sort of there in some form. (It usually is.)
It’s been so long since I read the Lord of the Rings, I don’t even remember how the books ended or whether they were satisfying. I think I’m one of the few people in the world who didn’t love it. I got tired of all the whimsical characters and I felt it dragged, but I pushed through all three just because I thought I should. It could just be me. I don’t read fantasy and I don’t get into lengthy world-building, not in itself…it had better serve the story or at least be short. 🙂
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For a single book, the author definitely always has the option of going back and altering the promise. Although I think we should be leery of weakening a promise we’re just struggling to meet. And things can get more complicated if it’s being serialized and the promise is already out there. A lot of TV shows, I think, flounder on this. It’s why many series finales end up being disappointing. (To be fair, when an epic show has been running for years, there’s almost no way to meet the expectations that have built up.)
LotR is an interesting case study, because I’ve seen some writers say it was successful in spite of how it was written. There’s an implicit promise at the beginning that we’ll eventually see a showdown with Sauron, which never happens. (The movies were actually careful to stipulate that he wouldn’t appear in person.) And the story goes on for a long time after his fall, with the whole Saruman thing feeling like a distraction.
I think for most fans, it ended up being successful because the world is so rich and developed. Tolkien worked on the background as a project in and of itself for decades before writing LotR, and you get a strong sense of an ancient world with lots of legendary stories we’re only getting a glimpse of. But you have to be a certain kind of nerd to be attracted to that. And I wonder if I would have been as captivated if I hadn’t read it as a teenager, when still at least somewhat religious.
Overall though, I think it shows that craft and structure only matter to the extent that there’s some minimal competence there. After that content is far more pivotal.
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I know what you mean about TV shows. I honestly don’t know how they do it. Especially when you have committees of writers working on them. And yeah, once some episode airs, there’s no taking it back to revise the promise.
“LotR is an interesting case study, because I’ve seen some writers say it was successful in spite of how it was written.”
So many things are like that. Consider 50 Shades. I started reading it and couldn’t believe how terrible it was. I still don’t get it. But LotRs is definitely much better and thematically much richer. I think that must be why it’s a classic—its themes resonate.
By the way, thank so much for leaving the first review on Amazon of my novel! It’s an awesome review, too. I really appreciate it.
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Another one similar to 50 Shades is The Da Vinci Code. I actually read it several years ago as research. Despite recognizing that the concept was pseudohistory and the writing pretty clunky, I actually found myself enjoying it at an emotional level. These books have something that the critics miss, and I think writers should study them. Although I haven’t been able to make myself read 50 Shades yet.
On the review, my pleasure. I also left the same one on the Goodreads entry. BTW, don’t know if you noticed, but the Kindle edition is available. I picked it up before making the review. Hopefully that’ll make the review count as coming from a verified purchaser.
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I never read the Da Vinci Code, but I imagine it was popular for a reason. I guess the reason for 50 Shades’ popularity—despite the dismal writing—was that it was from a young woman’s point of view and turned S&M into a romantic comedy, which hadn’t been done much before. I don’t think I’ve ever read a romance book, so maybe I’m just not the audience, but to me it was full of all the stuff I can’t stand in TV and movie romantic comedies: sexy, psychologically-tormented guy with murky past and loads of money must be “saved” by innocent young woman. The Secretary was way better, but I’m thinking of the movie, which might not be the best comparison.
Thanks again for the review! I’m not seeing a verified purchase on my end, but maybe that takes time to show up. I’ve been at a writing group meeting all day and I haven’t gotten a chance to alert people about the ebook. Apparently my audiobook is on hold at the local library with six people in line…I’m guessing that has something to do with the price of the print version, though I don’t know who those six people are or how they found my audiobook or why they didn’t just ask me for a code. People are so shy, it cracks me up. All I can say is, I’m really glad I got it recorded in time and the library agreed to acquire it.
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From analyses I’ve read, the secret of these kinds of books (Da Vinci and 50 Shades) may be their emotional rollercoaster aspect. So a reader is presented with a problem or set back, generating negative emotions, but usually by the end of the chapter, or the next one, that problem is solved, providing a feeling of accomplishment. But then it’s on to the next problem, etc. Apparently these kinds of books are more popular than ones that don’t give satisfaction until the end, or (in the case of many tragedy or horror stories) never give it.
On the verified thing, maybe there needed to be more time between purchase and review. Or it might be flagged due to the pre-release disclaimer or something.
That’s kind of funny with the library. I wonder if people are shy because they don’t want to feel too obligated. Reading (or listening to) a book is a time commitment. I know at times I’ve been reluctant to accept a beta copy because I wasn’t sure when I’d have time to read it.
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Interesting about the roller coaster effect. I would think something like that would be irritating, but then again, what do I know.
On the verified thing, I’m hoping it’s just a matter of time. I couldn’t find much detailed information about how that works, but I find Amazon a bit of a mess when it comes to finding information (or maybe it’s just me.)
It is funny with the library. I have no idea who those people are, so there is some chance they aren’t from my email list. Maybe the library alerts people about new audiobooks? Who knows. But yeah, I hear you about not wanting to accept a free code because you don’t want to feel committed. I think it was also the way I presented the information the first time around as just “Ask me for an audiobook code.” Forcing people to make a personal request didn’t work as well as having people sign up for my mailing list and other impersonal methods, like having people sign up for my mailing list or having the publisher for After Dinner Conversation send an email to his slush pile readers.
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I find Amazon great if you’re looking for standard info. But if you’re looking for anything off the beaten path, good luck. And finding anyone to actually call is impossible. I did once find a button I could click to have them call me for an issue I had on an expensive purchase. They called within a few minutes and were very friendly, but the whole setup felt very weird.
On the codes, I can see it being a tough quandary. After all, you give out freebies because you do hope people will rate and leave reviews. You don’t want to waste that inventory. So there needs to be some obligation. On the other hand, you want to keep it fairly low key so people don’t feel pressured. I’m pretty sure I’d get that balance wrong, at least the first time. Publishing seems like a lot of work, even when done traditionally.
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I had that same experience with Amazon. I thought it went pretty well and I was glad I didn’t have to wait forever on hold, but yeah, finding that info was pretty hard. I wonder if it’s still there.
“Publishing seems like a lot of work, even when done traditionally.”
It really is. And it’s not fun work either, at least not for me.
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I remember you talking about this series before and thinking it sounded really interesting. But then when it was book buying time, I forgot about it. I’ll have to go back and get book one.
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I actually have the opposite problem. I often buy an ebook after reading a review of it, but then let it sit in my account unread, not getting around to it for years, if ever. I try to remember that when I’m looking for something new to read, but it’s not unusual for me to pull up an Amazon entry and it remind me I bought the book in 2018 or something.
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My strategy has been to put together a list of books that sound interesting, then every two or three months I buy a whole bunch of books all at once. It’s not a perfect system, but I think it minimizes the pile of books I buy and forget about. I do tend to miss out on sale prices and special offers, though. Advantages and disadvantages.
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That’s not a bad system. It definitely sounds better than mine. In truth, I probably should make a list but not buy anything until I’m ready to read it. (Amazon even has a list feature, which I sometimes remember exists.)
Sales purchases are another potential source of unread books. But I’m alert to that one and mostly resistant to it.
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