The second Bobiverse novel takes off where the other one left off, but felt less fun. I don’t think it was necessarily less light-hearted but how entertaining this one is basically all depends on how entertaining Bob is to the reader – I don’t dislike Bob, but he also isn’t anywhere in my top ten of people I would like to clone and take over the world so I was ready for some other voices. It’s weird, I feel like one novel told from one Bob would have been fine, it’s the fact that it’s shifting view points but every single view points is the same voice that makes it oddly frustrating.
The novel continues to follow the major plot points introduced before – humanity has basically destroyed Earth and itself, and some of the Bobs are helping the remaining 15 million people get to planets in other systems that the explorer Bob probes have discovered throughout the universe. The original Bob AI continues to watch and attempt to play God to a stone age civilization though he meets some unexpected resistance, and the first Earth colonies settling on their new planets deal with the local wild life. Finally, the Bobs also have to start figuring out how to deal with the aliens they refer to as “the Others.” While exploring, some of the Bobs have reported back that they have found systems completely stripped of all resources – and in cases where there appeared to have been life, the life forms too have been taken, presumably as protein sources. With humans expanding, it is only a matter of time before one of their systems becomes a target.
There is one terrorist group on Earth that is against colonization because as they see it Earth had its chance, and humans don’t exactly deserve a chance to destroy more planets. I can’t say I exactly disagreed with them, especially considering that even reduced to only 15 million people, humans kept arguing, and couldn’t even agree to colonize the same planet together, with each community needing a separate planet. I mean I get the whole “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” philosophy but this seemed to be less about preserving humanity and more about the fact that if humans aren’t separated, they will simply fight and go to war. I’m not sure giving them several planets is going to be anything more than a long term bandaid given that space travel exists.
There was also a subplot with one Bob falling in love with a human. Basically, the format of these novels gives Taylor the opportunity to explore any potential sci-fi plot in existence with his many different Bobs. While this might have been an interesting side story, Bob as a romantic interest just doesn’t really work for me. He’s just such a generic white dude to me. He’s like the Bella Swan of sci-fi novels, easy for any person with slightly nerdy tendencies to relate to because we all share the same cultural references and like to think we are intelligent and logic driven, but not such a strong personality that the reader couldn’t easily see themselves in his place(s).
Overall, not bad, but it did feel a bit more tedious to me than the previous novel with the constant shifting between story lines, especially since every single Bob shared the same jokes and had to determine how to prioritize his production schedule and work on his TODO list. Repetition and emphasis aren’t always funny – I get that they are the same person, that point has been made. I feel weird giving this 2 stars because it wasn’t horrible but I realized that I actually enjoyed the books I had given 3 stars this year, but didn’t think they were great and it didn’t seem fair to them to give this novel the same rating. I’ll still finish it out because I am nothing if not a completionist, though. And already have the third one on my Kindle since I got all three published novels at the same time.
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