Heaven's River (Bobiverse Book 4)
✍️ Written by: Dennis E. Taylor
🏷 Genre: Sci-fi / fantasy
🗓 Published: 24th Sept 2020
📄 Pages: 608
🧐 My rating: ★★★☆☆ / 3 stars
More than a hundred years ago, Bender set out for the stars and was never heard from again. There has been no trace of him despite numerous searches by his clone-mates. Now Bob is determined to organize an expedition to learn Bender’s fate—whatever the cost.
But nothing is ever simple in the Bobiverse. Bob’s descendants are out to the 24th generation now, and replicative drift has produced individuals who can barely be considered Bobs anymore. Some of them oppose Bob’s plan; others have plans of their own. The out-of-control moots are the least of the Bobiverse’s problems.
When I wrote about book 3, I said that the constant context switching was becoming tiresome, and I would have liked to see Taylor focus on a single storyline.
Well, be careful what you wish for, I suppose. Because in book 4 of The Bobiverse, Heaven’s River, Taylor does just that. He focusses pretty much exclusively on a single storyline where Bob-1 goes to find a long lost clone, Bender.
The whole thing centres around a mega-structure called Heaven’s River where a race a beaver like folks called the Quinlans live. So we now have beaver-like Quinlans, the Merekat like Pav and the bat-like Deltans. Honestly, it all feels a bit unimaginative and repetitive.
🚨 Spoiler alert!
This book was longer than the others and I really felt it. 600 pages of Bob-1 running around Heaven’s River, finding Bender, then running around avoiding capture over and over just felt a bit boring after a while.
Overall I felt the book was okay, but I did feel like it dragged on a little too long. There’s multiple references to how the Bobiverse is thousands strong on this book and I think Taylor missed a trick by not exploring some more of the Bobiverse in Heaven’s River.
Taylor has started working on Book 5, I’ll probably pick it up and read it, but I have to be honest, Heaven’s River didn’t leave me yearning for more.
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