When I was a kid, I could pick up a book that I had put down, even months later, and start to read it without issue. I successfully did that recently with Delta-v. I am now starting to think that may have more to do with the quality of the book than anything else.
Well, I think so.
I enjoyed the previous books in the silly Bobiverse series. Or I remember doing so. I remember thinking that it wasn’t great, but good enough. I pretty happily picked this new edition up, and was a bit disheartened to find out that I was not able to remember who many of the characters were. So a catch up may be necessary.
In our time, Bob made a boat-load of money and promptly died. He wakes up to discover that his consciousness has been uploaded to a Von Neumann probe. Over the course of the first few books, said sentient probe engages in sci-fi adventures and makes copies of itself. Whether in my head or in the writing, I wasn’t doing much to distinguish these characters, but the book managed to more or less catch me up to who was doing what.
Yup, that’s a fair assessment. It is, for better or worse, sci-fi rigamarole. But not every meal needs to be a steak, and not everything I read needs to be high art.
So what is happening in today’s episode of the Bobiverse? Rather a lot. The constant cloning of Bobs has caused a certain amount of… erm, genetic drift. The Bobs are forming factions, and infighting is beginning. In the mean time, a missing Bob leads to the discovery of an O’Neill cylinder with a race of sentient beings living inside.
Ok, let’s look at two flaws. Like many novels that have two plotlines, one of the two managed to take more mental real estate in my head. Reading this, I only managed to care about the O’Neill cylinder. The other one seemed to be trivial, and what ultimately happened with it was pretty clearly telegraphed. Flaw two is the fact that with sci-fi, I don’t really think that there is anything new to talk about. While reading this, I found myself repeatedly saying things such as ‘oh yea, just like in [that other book].’ Which isn’t to say that there are no new ideas in this book, but just that all the ideas that this book tackles seem kind of like sci-fi old hat, and this is just one more take on many of those ideas. I wasn’t all that bothered by this, as I tend to side with Vladimir Nabokov and think that ‘ideas’ don’t make for a good book as much as execution does. Some of the executions here were fine. Others (like inserting notions of soul into some scientific ideas), not so much.
But I think that may be part of the point for the author. I imagine that he would tell us that this is a ‘feature not a bug’. To be very generous, we could say that this is a book that is breathing life into old ideas by speaking in the language of pop-culture and cliches. I am not sure that is a bad thing.
By and large, I liked the book enough to want to read the next one, and I will be on the lookout for it when it comes out. The universe they are creating is growing, and if I remember it for the next installment, I will be happy to inhabit it once again.
Failures in Polymathy 