Clara’s Verdict
The second book in Dennis E. Taylor’s Bobiverse series has the difficult job of following a debut that listeners called “what science fiction was meant to be” – and doing so at the point in a series where the novelty has worn off and the actual storytelling has to carry its own weight. It manages this with such confidence that multiple reviewers who’ve read all four books maintain it’s the strongest in the series. I’m not sure I’d go quite that far, but I’d say it’s at least the equal of its predecessor, which is exceptional for a sequel. This is proper science fiction: expansive ideas, genuine emotional investment, rigorous internal logic, and enough warm, self-aware humour to prevent it from collapsing under its own seriousness. Ray Porter returns to narrate, which is the news every Bobiverse fan wants to hear before anything else.
About the Audiobook
Bob Johansson – a sentient computer in a Von Neumann probe, the digital resurrection of a software engineer who was killed in a car accident and woke up as a space exploration AI – has been spreading copies of himself across the galaxy for forty years. The situation, to put it mildly, has deteriorated. A system-wide war among the human factions has killed 99.9% of the human race; nuclear winter is slowly making Earth uninhabitable; a radical group called the Others wants to finish the job on whatever remnants of humanity survive; the Brazilian probes – the antagonists of the first book – are still operational and hostile; and Bob’s various copies have now encountered a spacefaring species that regards all other life as a convenient food source. These are not small problems. Taylor handles multiple storylines with the structural confidence of a writer who knows exactly how much weight each thread can bear before it needs resolution. He’s particularly good on the existential texture of Bob’s situation – what it means to be a person who is also a fleet of persons, who has relationships with copies of himself that are simultaneously himself and not himself, and who has to make decisions that affect species he’s never met. The comedy is genuinely funny; the sadder moments land with appropriate weight. At nine hours, the pacing is exactly right for the scale of the story.
What the Bobiverse Does That Other SF Doesn’t
Taylor’s series has an unusual quality among hard science fiction: it refuses to make the scale of its ideas an excuse for emotional distance. The Bobiverse explores genuinely vast concepts – the Fermi paradox, the Drake equation, the long-term survival of human civilisation – but it anchors them in a protagonist whose anxieties are recognisably human. Bob worries about doing the right thing. He worries about loneliness. He makes jokes when he doesn’t know what else to do. This combination of big-picture scientific speculation and warm, character-centred storytelling is relatively rare, and it’s why the series has found readers who wouldn’t normally pick up hard SF.
The Narration
Ray Porter is one of the great audiobook narrators working in science fiction today, and the Bobiverse is the series that demonstrates why he’s irreplaceable. His performance across dozens of Bob variants – each with slightly different personalities shaped by different experiences since their divergence – is a technical achievement that sounds, in the best possible way, entirely effortless. He distinguishes each “Bob” with subtle but consistent vocal shifts, handles the science fiction exposition without letting it slow the narrative, and brings the precise comic timing that Taylor’s humour requires. Many listeners choose the audio version of this series over the print specifically because of Porter’s performance. Having heard him do it, that’s not a difficult choice to understand.
What Readers Say
With eighteen ratings averaging 4.5 stars, the response is strongly positive. One listener, who read all four books in a single week, writes that Book 2 “brings a new life to the story as a whole” – noting that the second volume does what second volumes rarely do, which is match rather than merely extend the energy of the first. Macca3260, who has completed the full series, observes that “even the last in the series is brilliant” – the quality never decays, which is genuinely unusual. Vertigo’s assessment is precise: “just as enjoyable as We Are Legion, both in content and execution,” which is the highest compliment a sequel can honestly receive. A reader who came to the series initially out of boredom describes finishing book three four days after picking up book one: “The series contains something I’ve not come across in sci-fi for a while: a genuinely new idea.”
Who Should Listen?
Science fiction readers who like their ideas large and their tone warm. Anyone who’s read the first Bobiverse book and needs to know immediately what happens next. Also, anyone who’s been put off science fiction because it tends toward the cold and technical – Taylor’s work has the rare quality of being both intellectually rigorous and emotionally engaging in the same breath. Listen to For We Are Many on Audible UK – and if you haven’t encountered We Are Legion yet, start there first and do not make any plans for the following few days.
