Science fiction has no shortage of sprawling space operas, but few are as disarmingly funny or quietly philosophical as Dennis E. Taylor’s five-book “Bobiverse” series. Despite its sharp humor, inventive premise and memorable characters, it’s a series that often flies under the science fiction radar. The Jan. 20 release of the Saga Press deluxe hardcover edition of “For We Are Many” (the second book in the series) provides a welcome excuse to revisit the “Bobiverse.”
The first book, “We Are Legion (We Are Bob),” begins in the present day with Robert Johansson (Bob), a “nerd/engineer with a Star Trek fixation,” as a later character describes him. Before the first chapter ends, Bob is killed in a car accident. He wakes up more than a century later in a world he barely recognizes.
From there, the premise unfolds quickly. Bob’s frozen body was preserved in a cryogenics facility in the hope that future medicine could revive him. What returns instead is a software reconstruction of Bob’s consciousness. After training on Earth, this new “Bob” is deployed as the controlling intelligence of an interstellar probe, tasked with traveling to other star systems and replicating himself in each to create an exponentially growing network of exploration and discovery. But the Bobs (Robert Johansson 2.0 and his clones) don’t just follow orders. They quickly exceed their mission parameters, colliding with aliens, human politics and everything else the galaxy can throw at them.
The first three books, “We Are Legion (We Are Bob),” “For We Are Many” and “All These Worlds,” form a satisfying, self-contained trilogy. Their central conflicts build toward a genuine resolution, even if the path there isn’t flawless. With so many interconnected storylines told from the perspectives of different Bobs, the narrative can occasionally feel scattered, and the timeline can get confusing. Some plotlines feel only loosely connected, and a few character beats repeat, especially once you’ve spent enough time with multiple versions of the same personality.
Because so many characters are clones, their voices sometimes blur together, particularly later in the trilogy, but those flaws never undermine the sense that the story is building toward something. Books four and five, by contrast, don’t simply continue that original arc; they branch off in a new direction. They expand the universe in interesting ways, but they also feel less unified, splintering into disparate and often unresolved subplots that lack the cohesion of the original trilogy.
Even so, the strengths of the series are, like Bob himself, legion. Its most immediate virtue, though not the most important, is its humor. Some references are obscure, but the jokes are silly, irreverent and well-timed. The books stay funny even when they’re dealing with genuinely deep and difficult ideas.
Those ideas are the real engine of “Bobiverse.” The books ask what defines humanity and what individuality even means when a person can be copied and edited. Bob is constantly confronting the existential question of what it means to be a machine, especially a machine that can produce versions of itself, each technically “him,” yet inevitably diverging.
As the series stretches across a 100-plus-year narrative, the Bobs run into an even harsher truth: as machines, they’re effectively immortal, but the humans they care about are not. The longer they survive, the more they’re forced to watch the people and eras that shaped them disappear. The books build that sadness into their structure, turning immortality from a superpower into a kind of slow grief.
Another major strength is the “science” in the sci-fi. The “Bobiverse” isn’t a hard sci-fi series in the strict sense. Among other liberties, it’s willing to handwave a propulsion system that makes interstellar travel feasible on manageable timescales. But when the series chooses to respect real-world constraints, it gets fascinating. Space combat, in particular, feels meaningfully different from most sci-fi because it takes physics seriously, accounting for immense distances, three-dimensional battlefields and light-speed limitations. In general, the series doesn’t lean so hard on technical detail that the plot gets lost in jargon, but it uses realism strategically, strengthening the story rather than bogging it down.
The “Bobiverse” isn’t perfect, but it remains one of the more underrated modern sci-fi series. It’s funny, thoughtful, unpretentious and intensely readable. With book six, “The Infinite Extent,” due out soon, now is an excellent time to discover the series. If you’re looking for a space opera that can make you laugh while quietly considering what it would mean to outlive everything you love, the “Bobiverse” delivers.
