Heaven's River

Book cover of Heaven's River.
By Dennis E. Taylor
Book 4 of the Bobiverse series

Review

★★★☆☆

Heaven’s River is the fourth book in the Bobiverse series. It starts a new storyline and changes the way the stories are told.

What I loved about the previous three Bobiverse books—We Are Legion (We Are Bob), For We Are Many, and All These Worlds—was how many interweaving stories they told. The chapters were very short, often just a few minutes to read, and each new one changed point of view and story. This kept the books moving fast.

Heaven’s River does away with that almost completely. There is only one story, subsequent chapters stay with the same character and storyline, and the chapters are much longer; some take over 30 minutes to read! The book is also twice as long as any of the previous ones. This made reading the book feel slow.

This book also ends the geek-power fantasy that was core to the series. Previously, Bob was a kind-hearted nerd who overcame all obstacles in his path by being clever. In Heaven’s River, a lot has gone wrong and the Bobs are powerless to stop it: the Pav are hostile, the humans want to separate from the Bobiverse, and the Bobiverse is breaking down into factions—gamers1, AI-obsessed Skippies, and isolationist Starfleet—while Bob himself is stuck on an alien topopolis.

All the apparent storylines turn out to be just one story: the exploration of the Quinlan topopolis to rescue Bender, which accelerates the fracturing of the Bobiverse. The actual investigation of the megastructure and the escape from the various groups trying to capture Bob was exciting to read, and several of the new characters introduced in those chapters are interesting, like Anek-23 and Theresa. I even missed seeing two twists coming! But the Bobiverse factions part of the story did not interest me. It makes me worried about how I’ll like Not Till We Are Lost, which I think will explore the splintering more.

Overall, the speed and multiple storylines are what I like most about Bobiverse, and this book does away with both. Still fun, but less so.

  1. Not quite as “overly cute” as the MMORPG-guilds-turned-mercenary Zokus from The Quantum Thief, but close. ↩