All These Worlds: Bobiverse, Book 3.

Taylor, Dennis E. All These Worlds: Bobiverse, Book 3. Stevens Point, WI: Worldbuilers Press, 2017. Available in Kindle and as an unabridged audiobook from Audible, narrated by Ray Porter, released 18 April 2017, publisher: Audio Studios, 7 hrs and 55 mins.. Other books in the series: We Are Legion (We Are Bob): Bobiverse, Book 1 and For We Are Many: Bobiverse, Book 2.

This volume mostly moves into space opera based in warfare, with subplots on interspecies friendship and AI/human friendship and love. At the cost of committing an act they accept as genocide of the alien and murderous Others, the human-descended AI Bobs save the human species. After that action, a central Bob — the Bob, Erlich thinks, the oldest, from whom the others were digitally cloned — has the Recognition that though alive and capable of love and loss and mournings, he is (and the other Bobs are) "a posthuman computerized starship," no longer human in the sense ordinary "Ephemerals" are human. It is decorous then that many of the Bobs will leave Homo sapiens to go our own ways — a return of the Others and other emergencies excepted — and live, so to speak, as Homo sideria: Star-Men.

Note also (1) development of the Bobs' moving among ephemeral humans and other sapient species in various android forms, and the possibility of embodied love between androids housing replicants; (2) learning the upshot of the story of a nonBob replicant; (3) finally getting a woman among the Bobs, in virtual marriage to one; (4) a bit of development of the difference between Bob AI and Artificial Machine Intelligence.

POLITICAL ALERT: Extermination of the Others is seen by the Bobs as problematic, but in the world of this novel it is a defensible ethical decision. On the other hand, Dennis E. Taylor created the world of the novel and created the Others worthy of extermination. Also, the series is great for male SF nerds, less great for girls or women.

RDE, Initial Compiler