So this is the second in the series of Bobiverse books.
Check out my review of the first book here
While the first book set up the premise well, this one carries it forward and makes it clear just how much more potential there is with Bobs increasing in number, travelling outwards and interfering with other life forms. As well as a few staying behind to coax humanity away from self destruction.
This introduces the issue of replicative drift, whereby there seems to be an inexplicable amount of mutation with each new Bob clone. This technically shouldn't happen, though that point is very much a part of the story.
Bob-1 continues his adventures with the Deltans.
And the Bob named Mario discovers something genuinely terrifying that sets the stage for events in book 3.
These story threads though, they tend towards my one, singular criticism of the series:
Way too much alien life.
Even by the standards of todays (very generous) predictions and the Drake equation in it's current form there's quite abundant life in the Bobiverse.
I would really have liked it to have gone the other way, though maybe there would have been less to write about, it would in a way have been scarier, but with potentially more at stake when life was discovered.
I think that it would take several more generations of tech and travel just find any kind of life, and the question of intelligent, sentient life existing anywhere should have been pushed back as far as possible.
Still, I can't care that much. This series has me hooked.