Amazing series!

Length: 9 hours 30 mins,   8 hours 58 mins,  7 hrs and 55 mins.
Total Length: 26 hours 23 mins

Narrated by: Ray Porter

I’ve recommended this book & this series to many family members, many friends, plus even a few people (House-mates) that I know who work at the European Space Agency, they are the ones that are especially intrigued.

Especially as you reference scientific concepts as the Von Neumann probes, Dyson sphere, & the Casimir effect for power generation etc.
My housemate Alex (working at ESA) will be listening to it starting from next week.
And my brother is currently about a quarter of the way through the 1st book, and he’s loving it so far.
I actually learnt a lot from these concepts, & for sure I’ll be listening to the whole series again, because the story and flow of the story is awesome.

As for myself, I’ll be listening to this entire series again for sure, however I want to give it some time.
I want to discover something else, & then come back to this series & kind of ‘re-discover’ it.

So what is this book about, if you’re recommending it so highly?

The basic premise… and it’s not so basic at that, is that Bob, was a living and breathing human in today’s time.
He sells his business, and is about to enter his relaxing retirement and learn the things he wants to learn, & on a whim signs up for his mind to be cryogenically preserved if he should die.
Which is ironic because he is very soon run over by a bus, but then wakes up 150 or so years later with his consciousness having been replicated into a computer.

Bob 2.0 thus comes back online.

But he comes back online in a time that humans are a war with each other, cryogenically frozen people have been declared to have no rights as the USA has become a Church state, and each major nation is in a race to build a von Neumann probe designed to save their version of humanity before all nations and therefore all other ideologies are destroyed.

The von Neumann probe in Bob’s case, is himself jacked into some pretty advanced technology and machinery.  He is tasked with looking for habitable planets to ensure human kind’s survival, gathering resources and self-replicating should it be needed for greater exploratory reasons, defense reasons, more resources gathering etc.

Bob is therefore self-replicating which when complete has a full copy of the previous version’s memory.  That being said, each Bob that comes online has slightly different personalities. And in order to avoid confusion go by different names, and choose to focus on different things. Which of course leads to some interesting story arcs.

Bill for example was one of original Bob’s 1st spawns and is interested in technological development, and therefore sets up the ‘Skunkworks’ and is after a while able to produce Faster- than-light communication.  Nicknamed SCUT… for which I forgotten what it stands for.

Ryker, another one of Bob’s 1st clones takes charge of going back to earth to rescue the rest of the Humans and begin transportation to other habitable worlds.

Concepts explored in this book series

I think one thing that is very interesting is that the book explores the feasibility of von Neumann probes, and how it could be done. 3D printers for example being the most likely choice.

-The creation of Virtual Reality environments within a computer program, so Bob can maintain some of his humanity and meet with other ‘Bobs’. Including sandboxing function to check for viruses and ensure plans for future upgrades proceed correctly

– Being a sky God. –the possibility that a god is simply a more intelligent life-form that is able to observe and comprehend much more than the native inhabitants of the planet.

-Philosophical battle with the notion of immortality and what it means to be human, conscious and moral.

-Contact with an ethnocentric alien race, where peaceful cohabitation is out of the question.

-Future energy sources such as the Dyson sphere (opens in a new tab)

-Terraforming

-Seed and species accumulation for safe keeping

-planet transportation

-The moral dilemma of interfering with other sentient races + guiding humanity for the right causes despite the desire for self-rule.

I won’t be doing a break-down of each book 1 by 1, because I really don’t want to spoil the story.
It IS after-all a continuous story.  So book 1 ends fairly abruptly and book 2 takes off exactly where book 1 left off.

In that regard, it is not like the Fred the Vampire series where each book has several mini-stories, and each story you can pretty much hear it without listening to the rest of them, even if there IS an overall story to be had.

But for the Bobiverse series, I don’t think it would work like that.  If you come in during the 2nd book…you would have no idea what’s going on.

This is one of those books that starts with a fantastic concept and just expands on it more and more, there’s so much adventure to be had… it reminds me much of ‘Off to be the Wizard’ by Scott Myers in that way.

Narration?

Ray Porter continues to do an excellent job. It’s just easy to listen to and he keeps the excitement alive when its needed. Which is exactly what you need for a book like this.
Plus, you can hear the emotion from the different versions of bob, which of course adds a bit of depth

Listen-ability?

This is by far one of the best series I’ve listened to, AND, and this is a big point, .. the series comes to a clean ending.
Some stories just continue on until it gets boring, but the ending here I think ended at the correct time.

It’s the kind of series where you want to stretch out, and really lose yourself in.  In fact on the 3rd book I found myself not listening all in 1 go because I knew it was going to end, and I wanted to savour it.

Even though it does have its moments, it’s not a particularly funny book like many series in the sci-fi genre recently, but it makes up for it in pure adventure, exploring actual scientific theories, and just plain awesomeness.

In 6 words,

THIS   SERIES   IS   A   MUST   LISTEN!