Review: Heaven's River, by Dennis E. Taylor
by
Stuart Holland
Heaven’s River is still fun, but I think its changed focus detracts from what made the previous Bobiverse books more effective. Bob and all of his clones are a revived 21st century software developer, so despite the sci-fi setting, their modern day reference-laden and colloquial way of speaking makes a lot of sense. The fact that they’re replications of each other also explains why they have very similar voices in terms of how they speak. That also lets the author use their own voice to inform Bob’s deeply - he sounds like a person like him should sound.
In Heaven’s River, I can see the limits of that where the book needs to break away from it. Bridget speaks too much like Bob, considering she’s supposed to be an entirely separate person, unlike the clones. She has different motivations, but it’s also clear from the narrative that they aren’t really as deep as Bob’s.
And then I think the primary story in the titular Heaven’s River is unfortunately the weakest part of the novel. The parallel story, about the was much more interesting, but occupied less space on the page. Not to mention that the entire plot in Heaven’s River, while understandable how it happened,
I also think there were some continuity errors in the story. Bob’s low bandwidth connection was a great way to create isolation, but later on he still remotely accesses other clones’ VR despite the premise of that isolation being that such a connection wasn’t possible. (Otherwise the other expedition members could have joined in in the reverse direction.)
The notion of replicative drift was very interesting, and the continued technological ramp up is also done well. Overall the story still is a lot of fun, but I feel it fell short of its predecessors.
