The Bobiverse

What Hacker News says

1. cpetersoMay 2026
   Dennis E. Taylor’s “Bobiverse” series is goofy, yet hard, SF about a guy (Bob) whose uploaded mind gets sold when the cryogenic hosting company goes out of business. Given a job piloting a deep space probe, he starts replicating and exploring the galaxy.
   thread
2. 7oiMar 2026
   It is absolutely one of my favourite series and made Dennis E Taylor an absolute goto author for me. I also love his Outland series. I quite enjoy listening to the Bobiverse audio books especially. Anything Ray Porter narrates is usually magnificent.
   thread
3. wmilOct 2025
   In the spirit of brining down the level of intellectual sophistication here, I have a few recommendations I've enjoyed.

   - All 18 Expeditionary Force books by Craig Alanson

   - The first 5 Starship's Mage books by Glynn Stewart. UnArcana Stars (book 6) went in a direction that made the government look extremely incompetent.

   - Jacques McKeown series by Yahtzee Croshaw

   - Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells

   - Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor

   Show morethread
4. reader1234Mar 2025
   I found Vernor Vinge is spot on. I recommend focusing on recent work. E.g. the Bobiverse (https://www.goodreads.com/series/192752-bobiverse) by Denis E. Taylor is a super easy read that touches on that. He takes a shortcut in early books by capping the progress in US via turning the country into a theocracy and then a bad WWIII that wiped out most of the mankind. Note that I haven't read the latest books, but even the previous ones are full of automation and humans are "ephemerals" - they don't live long. I am recently reading Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of time series. It goes beyond AI and mind uploading, expanding into biotech, the next big deal. With the right understanding of proteins and DNA/RNA, hacking living things is way easier than creating robots, as they self-repair, replicate, feed themselves, recycle things effectively, create ecosystems. The only reason we are not doing it is because our understanding of these mechanisms is very shallow.
   Show morethread
5. jjcmMar 2025
   Some other recommendations depending on what you liked about The Egg/Project Hail Mary/The Martian:

   If you liked explorative / conceptual Sci Fi, more for the thought exercise than anything else:

   - Exhalation by Ted Chiang. A collection of scifi short stories that are quite thought provoking. Some sprinklings of religion in some of them.

   - The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury. A classic, also a short story collection. Golden age scifi.

   - Project Hieroglyph. A collection of authors that partnered with Phd students to write short stories based on their research papers. Great concept with great stories.

   If you liked Andy Weir's focus on engineering/building:

   - Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor. A man uploads himself into a Von Neummann probe and replicates himself to play Factorio among the stars.

   - Destiny's Crucible by Olan Thorensen. MC gets sent to an alternate earth in a technological past, and attempts to re-introduce modern technology and build industry.

   Show morethread
6. sameerdsDec 2024
   Cue the "We are Bob" series, aka Bobiverse, by Dennis E. Taylor!
   thread