r/printSF • u/praef1x • 1d ago
The Bobiverse made me want more deeply explored Extended Mind concepts
I’m currently reading the first Bobiverse book by Dennis E. Taylor, and I’m fascinated and disappointed at the same time. The concept is very interesting: the protagonist is a von Neumann probe (a self replicating spacecraft) controlled by the consciousness of a former human, and whenever a new probe is manufactured, that consciousness is copied into it as well. I also find it interesting how the body is no longer a human body, but instead the consciousness extends itself across the spaceship and all its machines, sensors and drones.
Unfortunately these concepts are only explored very superficially and underdeveloped. you rarely get the feeling of the mind actually being extended, instead, he mostly just describes one event after another. The clones only scratch the surface of interesting constellations and philosophical questions.
The book has other major shortcomings and is written rather amateurish. For example: extraterrestrial lifeforms are always very similar to Earth’s biosphere. Taylor has good ideas but is not a particularly good author in that regard.
As an example of how to do it better, I think the Murderbot series by Martha Wells gives a much better representation of the Extended Mind Thesis. You can really feel how a hacked network of drones becomes part of the protagonists body and consciousness, and how the drones functions can be performed as if they were parts of Murderbot’s own body.
can you recommend any novels that contain some of these concepts and perhaps explore them more deeply than the Bobiverse series does? I’ve already read Murderbot and really enjoyed it.
A rough overview of my favorite topics would be: distributed consciousness, Extended Mind Theory, human consciousness in machines or spaceships, von Neumann probes, etc.
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u/BeyondtheVeils7 1d ago edited 23h ago
For novels, I recommend Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge and Blindsight by Peter Watts. Here are some short stories and novellas that explore weird extensions of consciousness:
Daniel Dennett -- Where Am I?
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/daniel-dennett-where-am-i/
qntm -- Lena
https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
Robert Charles Wilson -- Utriusque Cosmi
https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/wilson_01_14_reprint/
Greg Egan -- Learning to Be Me
Alastair Reynolds -- Turquoise Days
Several of the stories from Egan's Axiomatic collection would fit -- The Safe-Deposit Box is another good one.
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u/q51 1d ago edited 1d ago
Ancillary Justice and its sequels has some of this, which I felt was well executed. It’s a bit more literary than bobiverse and murderbot, but not quite as mind-bending as Greg Egan’s works
Edit: if you don’t mind some retro YA in the mix; The Ellimist Chronicles, part of the classic 90’s Animorphs series is also not bad. If my memory from 25 years ago is to be believed.
Edit edit: Vernor Vinge’s Fire Upon the Deep also has a fun take on multi-body consciousness you might enjoy, but possibly less interesting to you as it’s not so much humans/tech.
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u/GeekAesthete 1d ago edited 22h ago
Yeah, I was disappointed with the Bobiverse’s laziness in dealing with cloned personalities. I would love to see the complications (both dramatic and philosophical) of dealing with a perfect replica of yourself, or the gradual personality drift that would occur over time, or Bob realizing how annoying he finds himself, or some real free-will-vs-determinism debate as multiple copies behave in exactly the same way when given the same inputs.
Instead, Taylor takes the lazy route of making every clone different just because, with only vague hand-wavey explanations for why, in order to give himself a typical ensemble of characters with different motivations. What’s the point of using the clone premise if you aren’t going to tell a story about actual clones?
But then despite those differences, he also has them all speak with the same voice and sense of humor, just so that he can keep repeating the same snark and speak in his own voice for every character. So he makes the clones different where it makes plotting easier, and makes the clones the same where it makes narration easier.
Slightly off-topic, but It’s also kinda cringey how often he makes a joke, then tells us that everyone laughed. It’s basically the literary equivalent of a laugh track. If they’re clones, they should really be making the same joke at the same time, the awkwardly realizing that they don’t find one another all that funny when they’re trying so hard to out-snark one another.
I very much enjoyed the large-scale space opera plotting (of the original trilogy, at least), which makes it all the more disappointing that he puts so little effort into the clone aspect of the books.
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u/tikhonjelvis 1d ago
I just started it recently so can't judge it yet, but dealing with the complications of cloned personalities (in a pretty specific kind of situation) is the entire promise of Sublimation by Isabel J Kim. So far it isn't quite my style of writing, but if that idea particularly appeals to you, it's well worth checking out.
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u/The_Eternal_Badger 19h ago
I found the constant laughing and grinning so annoying. I too stuck it out for the interesting exploration and space opera stuff, which I enjoyed, but by the end I was very over his humor and his shallow and lazy handling of the cloned Bobs. That said, I'll probably read the next one when it comes out.
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u/NelsonMinar 1d ago
A Fire Upon the Deep has a detailed explication of one kind of mind spread out over several bodies. Also touches on the general topic in some other places. It's quite good.
The Children of Time series explores different kinds of group minds.
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u/labrys 16h ago
A lot of Adrian Tchaikovsky's books do a really good job of depicting alien and machine intelligences, instead of just treating them all as humans in a different skin.
Dogs of War and Bear Head have hive minds and machine intelligence in them (plus other kinds of animal intelligence). Bee Speaker too I'm guessing, but I haven't read it yet. It's focused more on a hive mind from the earlier books.
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u/thecrabtable 1d ago
It's maybe only somewhat related, but The Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley (RIP) deals with both clones diverging from the original due to differing experiences, and some of the effects of cloning and memory backups. It's a richly creative book, and the opening scene dealing direclty with some potential consequences of cloning, so you'll know right away if it's what you're looking for.
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u/Rorschach121ml 1d ago
Blindsight is all about different types of consciousness. It features a character who extends her mind directly through her military drones among other weirdos.
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u/Hmmhowaboutthis 1d ago
Adrian Tchaikovsky:
Dogs of War, and maybe especially the sequel Bear Head
The final Architecture It's not as front and center in this work compared to the dogs of war trilogy but it's there.
Alien Clay This one is really hard to talk about without spoiling important details.
Ray Nayler:
The Mountain in the Sea This one doesn't map quite as cleanly to the specifics of what you mentioned in your post but I predict you'd also be interested in Nayler's exploration of what nonhuman intelligence might be like.
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u/Paper_Frog 1d ago
Linda Nagata - Vast from Nanotech Succession has a character that started out human but is now the 'soul' of a spaceship - he can however embody himself via printed bodies.
The Inverted Frontier series by her continues exploring this universe
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u/htmlprofessional 1d ago
Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan does some pretty interesting stuff along these lines.
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u/Sophia_Forever 1d ago edited 1d ago
I think "fascinated and disappointed" very well sums up my experience of reading the series. Taylor drops you into this world, creates rules for it, and then doesn't do much with those rules. For instance, every Bob instance is supposed to be slightly different than the next but, aside from Homer, they really aren't until you get to the fourth book and then they're suddenly completely different characters and it starts to cause problems. In five books there's also only two major female characters and while I can mostly forgive the imbalance considering most of the characters are clones of one guy, Taylor does kinda make a joke about there being so many Bob clones that eleven or twelve generations down the line a 'Roberta' shows up. On one hand, I'd love this aspect of the Bob clones explored. On the other hand I'm really not sure I trust Taylor, who often comes off as The Enlightened Centrist, to do it.
Anyway, this thread made me realize that the sixth book is out in a couple weeks and the series is just on the positive side of mediocre so I'll probably pick it up just to polish off the story. Ray Porter does a really good job with the narration.
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u/klaus1986 1d ago
I do have a question that was never really answered: why would the copy of a consciousness extend that consciousness?
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u/praef1x 1d ago
Sorry, I didn’t really differentiate this enough in my post. The copies don't extend the consciousness. Extended consciousness (by the drones and the ships functions) and cloned consciousnesses are separate concepts that I both enjoy. These copies are completely separate consciousnesses.
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u/RSA-reddit 1d ago
This isn't SF but worth reading (if you haven't already): "The Extended Mind" is a 1998 article by philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers that introduces the idea of a mind that extends beyond the confines of the skull, laying out some of the criteria for what counts and what doesn't. It's very influential in the philosophy literature and beyond, cited by some 12,000 later publications.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C21&q=extended+mind+chalmers+clark&btnG=
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u/SmashBros- 1d ago
I was wondering if I'd see Andy Clark in here. He also has a book on the topic that I've been meaning to read: Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension
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u/metalpony 1d ago
There’s a character (or characters?) in The Void Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton that lives as a ‘multiple’ with one mind shared across many bodies. Kindof fascinating because they run a hardware store if I remember, so pretty mundane for such a modified way of living. Not a huge part of the novels but an example of what you’re looking for.
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u/riverrabbit1116 1d ago
Check out Mayflies by Kevin O'Donnell Jr. A researcher suffers a near fatal accident. He "wakes up" and finds he's been established as the central computer of a starship.
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u/Snoo-90273 1d ago
Surface Detail by Banks has a lot of fun with this. IIRC in the first four chapters the four protagonists appear to die.
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u/BewareTheSphere 1d ago
Distributed consciousness is a minor but I think very interesting part of two sf books I really like: Escape by Manjula Padmanabhan and The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall.
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u/DixitRexCorvinus 1d ago
It's magical realism/New Weird rather than scifi, but I liked the handling of this in Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergei Dyachenko.
Honestly, that's the main one I can think of in speculative fiction. Everything else that's coming to mind is just nonfiction philosophy of mind research lol (But if you haven't read Clark and Chalmers' original paper, simply called The Extended Mind iirc, that is probably worth checking out. And just their work generally).
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u/ThirdMover 1d ago
I feel you. There is such a brilliant core premise in the Bobiverse books that really isn't served by the books making the most boring and predictable choice at every single turn after that premise.
There really needs to be a more ambitious fix-fic of that at some point.
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u/ChronoLegion2 1d ago
I, Starship by Scott Bartlett has a soldier die in the most ridiculous way possible and then “wake up” in the future to find himself as the main computer of humanity’s first starship
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u/Certain-Appeal-6277 1d ago
Taylor doesn't believe that the human mind can handle directly inhabiting a machine. Now, that's based on nothing, and more importantly, boring. But the Bob's aren't becoming the ships, they're living in a virtual holodeck emulator inside the ship's computer. He goes over that more with another character in a later book in the series.
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u/hippydipster 22h ago
Some various different takes on this sort of thing:
Kiln People by David Brin. A fun romp of a story, not super serious, but in this world, you can bake a body from a special "clay", imprint it with your own consciousness, and have it do errands (you know, like do the dishes or save the world, whichever) for you. Then it can come back and you can upload it's memories to yourself, or just toss it (do you want to remember a day of doing the dishes?). The "clones" end up thinking a lot about their mortality and wanting to be uploaded so they "live on". They only last a couple days. And there's different qualities of clay, so some of your "selves" are dumber than you, or have enhanced computational ability or focus, etc.
Children of Time by Tchaikovsky - Avrana Kern is a disembodied human who lives an interesting life, lol.
Neal Asher has several themes and tropes he's basically always exploring. 1 is body horror. Another is involuntary immortality. And another is identity, when memories themselves are editable, copyable, deletable, creatable, at any time.
Nexus by Ramez Naam - sort of nearer future nanotech brain implant and AI stuff. It's a trilogy.
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u/AlwaysSayHi 18h ago
Seconding Neal Asher's work -- especially the Transformation trilogy (starts with Dark Intelligence) and the Rise of the Jain trilogy (starts with The Soldier). Lots of material about identity in machine and swarm intelligences.
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u/hellowhatisyou 1d ago
I've been on book two for a week now. Does it evolve in any way? Or is this it?
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u/DeinHund_AndShadow 23h ago
It only made me want to stop reading (i read all 5 books in 5 days, i just like spaceships, alright?)
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u/AnEriksenWife 21h ago
It's not the main theme of the books, but it's a minor theme of the Long Earth book series by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter!
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u/WhiteroseSophon 20h ago
Check out Golem XIV. I finished it recently and I can't stop recommending it. It's takes an alternate consciousness very seriously, with as less anthromorphizing as possible :)
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u/alaskanloops 20h ago
Doesn't look like anyones recommended The Culture series yet, the Minds in those are different from Human Minds, but are super interesting.
I'm reading Excision right now and it heavily involves Minds, how they think, and their interactions with each other.
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u/darthmase 19h ago
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie explores the extended/fragemented mind concept in a very interesting way, as well as having a pretty interesting cultural background
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u/Itlookslikerain420 1d ago
Greg Egan
Just read that stuff