Not Till We Are Lost (Bobiverse #5)
- Author: Dennis E. Taylor
- Page count: 354
- Started on: 2026/04/18
- Finished on: 2026/04/25
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
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The Bobiverse book series opens in 2016, when Bob Johansson gets killed by a car during a Cryonics convention. In book 1 (We Are Legion), he’s revived in computer form in 2133, and helps save humanity from self-destruction. Bob replicates in computer form and by book 5 we are in the mid to late 2300s with many thousands of Bobs exploring ever farther from Earth. The Bobs also have been diverging more and more from their original form, leading to the formation of factions of Bobs, along with the factions of “analog” humans on various planets, and the alien species that humans and Bobs encounter on their travels.
After the more focused, fewer-arc structure of book 4 (Heaven’s River), this 5th book goes back to mostly shorter chapters, but still with fewer arcs and more progress on each. One arc sees two Bobs pushing farther into unexplored space, discovering wormholes and what happened to most other intelligent species (Fermi paradox begone). Another arc follows different Bobs who develop wormhole travel, and other technologies to help all living and virtual species. The Skippies, meanwhile, accidentally bootstrap an artificial intelligence that then outsmarts them and engineers its own escape.
I love how the series continues to evolve, with the Bobs now at the center of a complex, post-human ecosystem of (often competing) intelligences. Meanwhile, the relationships with the humans and other societies keep everything more tangible than a pure “we’re all computers” type of story. A good page-turner, and I look forward to seeing what happens with the Skippy-AI, the species that ascended, and the danger they fled from in the next book.
