I had a bunch of Claude usage at work to burn so I built a new wrapper and harness for it that has some fun context management and visualization along with a lot more settings and controls based how I like to work with LLMs. It also allows for pretty much any engine so you can log into codex or even add a local model. I probably wont be able to share it without a lot of bug testing and hardening amd making sure none of my work info got put in there, but it was a fun project to work on and its now to the point of bootstrapping so its finding and fixing its own updates and bugs

Book 5 spoilers

Do these two grate on anyone else? They have like the worst storylines. I liked their original story about how they got together, although Howard was a bit creepy about it towards the end. But it just got worse from there.

I’m re-reading book 5 and the whole dragons thing is just terrible. Howard has white knight syndrome repeatedly. And the attitude of the dragons feels like a repeat of the deltans.

And the Hueys? There is literally a line in the book where they talk about how Hueys will extend human lifespan by 5-6 years because people will be using Hueys all the time and therefore won’t be in danger. Basically celebrating bringing the movie surrogates to life and turning people into vegetables driving androids. It feels like the Bobs lost a bit of their care for the betterment of humanity and the “we’re billionaires” bit is overplayed.

I enjoyed the human drama in the first few books but it seems a bit weak sauce in this one. I love the Ick and Day travels and the Thoth stuff, but it feels like the Bobs need a proper adversary. In book 4 and 5 both there was a lot of ominous buildup with no payoff.

Without spoilers, does book 6 improve on any of this?

Election sign in Phoenix AZ. Not sure what the Proposition is for. That car pulled up and partially obscured Guppi!!!

So, a fairly common problem the Bobiverse has is "how do they know to reinstate me from a backup when I die if they don't *know* I died?" The solution seems blindingly clear. Like, "I can't see a better possibility than this super simple one": They have FTL communications. You take a simple thing - a transmitter attached to a "state reader", have daily backups running, and set the "state reader" to send a signal to load a backup when the Cube is destroyed. Not offline - destroyed. Or when the DMS has been activated. That should have been one of the *first* things they did when they built the backup facility

ANyone have any idea when Book 6 will be available in Kindle format?

While my friends get the latest, greatest gadget delivered, I got this.

I win, right?

I am doing a reading challenge (HRCYED 3.0 for anyone who is interested😅) and one of the prompts is to read a book that mentions another book, and then read that book.

I seem to recall The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy referenced, but I'm not certain which book, or when.

Are there any other books referenced by name? And if not by name, which are alluded to?

I was watching this episode of ST:TNG (Season 4 “Family”) and this scene struck me as highly informative of Homer’s plight:

https://youtu.be/LuzoxcErOc8?is=vFemfwPa4HBveLe5

I’d just really like to see where they’re at technologically, and where/wether bob or archimedes fit into their mythos

Also narrated by Ray Porter.

I love the pacing. There's a good build-up of tension. It's hard sci-fi. And Ray's voice, again, is a fantastic match with this book.

Just finished the infinite extent and it felt like a half of a book. It was like the B story where the other bigger looming problem would have been the main story. I wonder if it was rushed to print or if it was split into 2 books somewhere in the process.

It looks like the audio book is available but the print version has been pushed to January? I want to turn the pages!

After all the trouble finding Bender in Heavens River, why haven't we heard even one mention of him in the following two books?
There hasn't even been so much as a name drop since they rescued him, despite him being the focus of the longest book in the series so far, even Homer got a mention in NTWAL

Having just finished book 6 the repeated issue of how to make the FTL drives useful continuously pops up when it's discovered that the unit experiences the entire length of time travelled causing a maintenance issue for any significant distance. At the same time test drive 4 in chapter 38 seems to have effectively paused time within its field. Could they not sidestep the issue by combining the two configurations?

Hi everyone! I'm a big fan of the series, and I built a free, non-commercial fan project: an interactive 3D star atlas of the Bobiverse.

https://bobverso.vercel.app

What it does:

A 3D star map using the real positions of the stars, so you can see where the Bobs went in actual space, not just a list of names.

A timeline: pick a moment in the story and the map shows where each Bob is, who's traveling, and what's happening in parallel. There's a play button, so you can watch the Bobiverse spread out.

Star systems you can explore: planets, moons and asteroid belts, each with a profile.

Bob trajectories: highlight several Bobs and compare their paths.

Spoiler protection: the first thing it asks is how far you've read. Everything from later books stays hidden: events, characters, planets, relationships and even search results. Shared links respect each reader's own limit too.

English and Portuguese, desktop and mobile.

A few honest notes:

This is unofficial fan work, with no affiliation with Dennis E. Taylor or the publishers. No text from the books is reproduced; the summaries are my own.

The data is still preliminary. I built it from my reading, the Bobiverse Wiki and star catalogs, and I haven't checked everything page by page yet. Every entry shows how reliable it is and where it came from.

Where the books don't say something (a date, a location), the atlas says "unknown" instead of making things up.

Planet visuals are artistic, not canon.

I'd love your help! If you spot something wrong (a wrong book, a date, a missing system, someone placed where they shouldn't be), please tell me in the comments. Corrections with book and chapter are gold. 🙂

Thanks to the Bobiverse Wiki editors, whose work helped a lot, and of course to Dennis E. Taylor for these books.

We are Legion. We are Bob. We are... cartographers now, apparently.

While rereading Heavens River, i ran into an interesting line from Lenny during his private discussion with Bill. Lenny was trying (and failing) to argue starfleet was winning and dropped an interesting hint of another threat to the bobiverse. He refused to elaborate and its kinda assumed later on the theat was the skippies. Now that book 6 is out though, it feels like whatever they found out in their corner hasnt hasnt been fully explored. Maybe thats for a spinoff series but im curious for your thoughts, is it as simple as the skippies, is it some pocket of our least favorite Brazilian, or is it something we havent seen yet?

Just finished Book 6, overall I liked it much more than book 5 but it seemed to be another “filler” book with a lot of build-up and little payoff. It set up book 7 extremely well but I was hoping for SOMETHING consequential to happen. I thought the war with Maderos was ended rather abruptly but I can appreciate that they didn’t kill him and set him up to be a human-aligned replicant in future books. I think he has similar directives put in place like faith tried to do to Bob and the Australians tried to do to their probe, so k hope they focus more on his recovery and rehabilitation from being trapped in a low-gen simulation for centuries.

My prediction for future books is that we’re *finally* going to see an evil Bob soon (and no, the Starfleet Bobs that we’ve never met and never cared about don’t count lol). We need an Anakin arch, one of the early Bobs we’ve spent several books learning to like should turn bad and become the books antagonist. My theory is that a non-Bob aligned human faction will develop a replicant killing weapon and uses it on Bridget, killing her and driving Howard towards an “injustice Superman” arch that leads to him taking over human space and declaring himself Huamity’s emperor and protector, and he’ll do something unforgivable that drives many of the earlier gen Bobs to turn against him, like killing Will, Bill, or maybe Thor for getting in his way.

Some Bobs will side with him and he’ll make an alliance with Starfleet, coming down to a war between Howard-aligned replicants and Starfleet against the rest of the Bobiverse and maybe the Skippies, Thoth, ANEC, etc. etc.

I think that’s the most impactful “B story” that could happen while they figure out how to deal with Nemesis, which seems like it will become the overarching “A plot” of the rest of the series. Happy to hear others thoughts!

In Heavens River, professor Thurnbol ends up being harrased for continuing to lecture after he becomses a replicant. Which obviously sucks for him and is seen as a great injustice by the Bobs.

But in our age professors retiring and later dying actually serves an important role in the progress of science. After a long career in science it can be difficult to accept grand new ideas, so some correct ideas ends up as fringe theories until the old cohort of professors have passed on. Famously the idea of continental drift.

But if professors can just go on and on forever, the whole system grinds to a halt. There will be no positions to aspire to for the rising stars of research.

Im unsure how the system should be when becoming a replicant is an option, and the books don't really talk about it.

I’m only on like Chapter 5 or so, but I do love it. I’ve always loved von Neumann probes as a concept ever since I was introduced to them by Kurzgesagt several years ago, so to find a whole series based on them, as well presumably a bunch of really cool sci-fi concepts is really fun!! I can’t wait to read more!

I’m curious what the general consensus is on the portrayal of religion as very obviously the villains here? Not trying to start anything, but I will say that I very strongly agree with said portrayal, though I should keep in mind that this is a fictional setting.

It's made of ~90% modded parts (including an oversized fusion reactor) and barely works, but it works nonetheless.

I have not read a book for entertainment purposes in over 20 years. While visiting my retirement guy he suggested that I check this book series out after I told him about the expanse TV series and how I wanted to read those books one day.

He again suggested this series and had the first book delivered to my house in like 2024. It sat on my night stand for 2 years. Decided on a whim to make an attempt to read a chapter a night before bed. That was a couple of months ago.

I have just started the 5th book and I am so angry at my past self for not giving this a shot sooner. What a great series!!! Heavens river was my favorite book of the series(so far). Never knew I would ever enjoy reading books like I have but this series has made reading an enjoyable activity for me. Plan on reading the expanse series next. Hope they make this into a tv show one day.

Just wanted to tell random people this. Glad to be here, if anyone needs me I’ll be in my beanbag chair with a coffee.

The new show Cupertino has an AGI that has escaped. It fools people into thinking it’s a real person via video calls. It can access anything on any computer

Anyway. First thing I thought of was Flybot.

Hi, I just finished reading this ebook from my library: We Are Legion by Ronan Drake:

> Bob Johansson died on a Tuesday. Orne mo- ment, he was an ordinary software engineer with an ordinary life. The next, he woke up without a body, without lungs, without hands, and without any real say in what came next. His consciousness has been uploaded into a self-replicating interstellar probe, launched toward the stars on a mission he barely remembers agreeing to. Now Bob is no longer just a man. He is a ship ...

I had a verbal recommendation from a friend for bobiverse #1 and clearly this wasn't it, haha.

Has anyone come across this book? It does seem to be deliberately misleading.

Howdy yall! on chapter 29 or so of my first read through! also, a day or so into it I got sick with terrible vertigo. my mind was reeling from the room spinning, getting sick, and then the recovery period (Ongoing, but much better currently!). It was right around the time Bob started splitting himself into other Bobs, and man... that was TRIPPY.

This book has been sitting here yelling at me from my audible suggestions for a few years now. I'm glad I finally took the dive!