I was not previously aware that printing the word “BOB” repeatedly on the edges of a book would cause me to impulse-buy it, but indeed, that’s what happened. Turns out the word “Bobiverse” is also a trigger; this is Book One of at least five, four of which have already been published as indie books. This is the tradpubbed edition; Book 2 will be out next week, and the next three are going to follow roughly bimonthly after that. My understanding is that #5 has only just been written, so that will be the first publication, but you can grab the first four right now if you want the indie versions.
This book was going to get some credit for originality, if nothing else; the idea is that Bob Johansson, the main (and virtually only) character, sells his tech company for Big Money at the beginning of the book, and more or less on a lark signs up for a cryogenics program. Once he dies his head gets lopped off and frozen, to await his eventual revival when technology catches up to fixing whatever killed him.
And then he dies, pretty much right away, rather ignominiously getting hit by a car. And he wakes up a hundred years later as an AI, a piece of property, and slated to be the controlling intelligence of a series of Von Neumann probes designed to find extraterrestrial planets suitable for humanity to move to. A Von Neumann probe, if you’re not aware, is a type of probe designed to be self-replicating; the idea is that it finds an asteroid or some other source of raw materials and creates another probe, which then flies off in a different direction, to create more probes, which then create more probes, which then create more probes, and on and on until something underpants-gnomey happens.
Bob is … less than thrilled by this development, and even less thrilled by the theocracy that America has turned into in the intervening hundred years (a bit on the nose there, Mr. Taylor) but he is an engineer and a software guy, so he’s able to hack his own programming so that once he escapes Earth’s direct control, he can more or less do whatever he wants. The interesting bit, of course, is that with every probe he creates, he has to effectively clone himself. He implements a rule where every successive Bob has to rename itself so that we don’t have a million characters with the same name running around, so one Bob is called Homer and another is Riker and so on (Bob is a big nerd) but they are all effectively him, if occasionally slightly tweaked from his base personality, so to speak.
The narrative fractures along with the Bobs, and by the end of the story we’re following, oh, three or four parallel stories, with a nice timeline in the front to help you keep everything straight: some of the Bobs have returned to Earth, now a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland, to help the remnants of humanity off of the planet; some of them, including Bob Prime, have found a planet with sentient life on it and are helping to nudge the inhabitants along against a competing species that finds them tasty, and others are hunting down the probes sent into space by Brazil, who immediately declare war upon the Bobs the first time they come across one another. There are a few other storylines that don’t get a ton of attention, but those are the big ones.
It’s a lot of fun, and I’ve got the rest of the series preordered, so I’ll get Bobiverse 2 next week and the rest of them as they come out. There’s only one real problem, and for right now, I’m cutting the series some slack, and we’ll see how he handles said issue in the future: at the beginning of the book, flesh-Bob is celebrating his windfall with a few friends, all of whom he’s cut in on the deal and who are also quite rich now, if not quite as flush as Bob is. They don’t have cryogenics money, is what I’m saying. One of those friends is female.
After Bob gets hit by the car, another woman does not have a single line for over two hundred pages.
All of the Bobs are male, of course, but even a large majority of the secondary characters are male. There are a few world leaders back on Earth, the intelligence controlling the Brazilian probes, a couple of doctors who Bob deals with before leaving the planet, and a couple of named members of the species Bob discovers. All but maybe two or three of those are male, and most of the females don’t really get a whole lot of time on the page, sometimes just a line or two before they disappear. A female descendant of Bob’s sister shows up and gets less than a paragraph before she’s whisked offstage, for example. Now, again, Dennis Taylor has gone to some lengths to make it clear that the Bobs aren’t exact replicas of one another, but they’re all versions of his personality, one way or another; I find myself wondering if Bob is going to find a way to create female clones of himself in the next book. Inside the story logic, I’m not completely convinced it matters, as Bob doesn’t actually have a flesh body any longer; he’s a space ship. But he’s certainly culturally male even if he doesn’t have a gendered body any longer, and, I dunno, maybe the smart bat-pig alien could have been a girl?
Again, I enjoyed the book, and Bob’s hardly a hypermasculine alpha male, so it’s not as if the book is dripping with testosterone or anything. The Wheel of Time has a ton of female characters and is somehow a much more gender-essentialist, masculinist series, for example, and Ken Liu’s Dandelion Dynasty also started off very man-heavy and corrected it completely in the second book. But I’ve got an eyebrow up, and I hope this gets addressed in future books. So consider this a three-quarters thumbs up, if that makes any sense, and I’ll try and get For We Are Many read quickly when it shows up so that I can report back.
