I wanted something more light hearted after William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy and Burning Chrome. This wasn’t what I expected. This is sold as fun science fiction. It isn’t that. It is pretty serious with some fun references to geek culture. With Sprawl trilogy I wanted to know who and where before each chapter. In this book chapter titles tell who, when and where. It makes following different stories much easier.
When I got this it was part of Bobiverse trilogy. Now there is fourth book in series. Series tell about self-replicating sentient probe. It starts with Bob who is used as base of probe’s sentience. Bob was frozen after he died. 117 year later he wakes up as software. Later software is uploaded into probe and probe is sent to search for habitable planets. After entering to first system Bob start to replicating himself and new Bobs are sent to new systems.
Book has interesting premise and ideas. But most of the time book is telling Bobs’ investigation of new systems or Bob sent to Earth to deal with people of Earth. Versions of self-replicating software as protagonists work as an idea. But that is not enough. Books needs more. System exploration is pretty hard science fiction. Bobs’ monologs and dialogs are as interesting as you expect from probes to exploring systems pretty realistically. There is very little of anything like story arcs. Different probes just exploring different or solving problems as they come.
I don’t understand the praise this book gets. It has original ideas and lot of references geek culture. But each story drags on second half. First part is quite good but when Bob start to replication everything start to drag. That is about the time book stops to investigate idea of sentient software. I planned to listen the whole trilogy but I am not sure if I want more of this. Next book won’t have similar beginning which was the best part of this book. After beginning there is funny Star Trek prime directive discussion and playing god going wrong arc. Everything else is not that interesting to be honest. I don’t understand how this could win any science fiction book of the year awards. It has original idea but it needs much more.