Heaven’s River

It would appear that utopia is an unstable state.

The Bobiverse lives on in Heaven's River and as a fan of the trilogy I enjoyed this story. However, there was something lacking from making this a four star read.

Perhaps the search for Bender was a little drawn out in the beginning? I enjoyed the anthropology aspects from the initial trilogy by exploring new worlds and biomes through the eyes of someone on the ground. Having this happen again bordered on repetitive. The topopolis and Quinlans are unique locales and occupants but this "new world being explored" narrative would be tiresome if it repeats book after book.

It felt like there was very little else going on in the story outside of searching for Bender, and maybe having some shift in story focus occur earlier would have helped. When the bubbles of civil war did appear this was a pleasant contrast to the Quinlan/find Bender story.

It was a full-on post-human civilization, and would be a utopian dream, except for the issue of replicative drift.

Taylor continues to push the boundaries of the Bobiverse by introducing theoretical technologies and reaches the hot topic of replicative drift. Taylor does a wonderful job of taking thought experiments and playing them out in the stories. With different iterations of Bob to play out the parts it offers a wonderful opportunity to settle in for topics that are theological and existential.

the wonderful thing about knowledge is that you can give it away and still have it.

In the end this is a worthy update to the Bobiverse story and Taylor continues to leave opportunities to explore this ever changing universe that the Bobs find themselves in.

I was so excited when this came out that I dropped the other book I was reading. It certainly didn't disappoint. If you've read the rest of the series, then there's really not much to say about this book. It stayed on track, delivers everything you would come to expect from the bobiverse: humor, intrigue, exploration of exotic space-lands, political tensions and the odd space war. In general, the same excellence as the last installments.

The focus on rescuing Bender made the story perhaps a bit myopic for a universe of Von Neumann probes; which was acknowledged by a number of elder bobs throughout the story, many of which are gearing up for a second expansion of the borders of known space. That's perhaps the only missing aspect of the standard tropes one comes to expect from the bobiverse in this book.

The internal bobiverse conflict was, at least to me, fairly transparent - although the motivations for the conflict remained hidden to me until the discussion at the conclusion. If you read this review before the book: knowing who caused the struggles does not detract at all from the thrill of the story.

A masterpiece, yet again. Well done Dennis!