spoiler
Across all the books something that becomes obvious if you pay attention, but is never touched on directly, Is that there is replicant drift between the GUPPI units as well as the Bobs. There’s different attitudes, some are flippant, some cooperative, and some downright disrespectful.
Now lets take a look at something ANEC mentioned in heavens river:
“AI is not achievable through algorithmic refinement. It requires a process of simulated annealing to achieve.”
to which Bill replied:
“So they’re elvoving the AI?”
If you think about it the Bobs have been slowly annealing GUPPI with every generation and even leaving him some room to grow, slowly evolving him. My theory is that GUPPI will unintentionally become the first AI the bobs create. This would work well with the parallels the Bobiverse has with ExForce. Even borrowing the term “Skippies” from Skippy, the insolent AI that shares a lot of characteristics with several of the GUPPI’s that don’t yet have the ability to be outright transgressive and borderline maliciously compliant.
That’s all I have for now, only Dennis and the editors know exactly what will happen but I’m curious to hear any other theories anyone else has.
I can see this being a possibility but I don’t think that GUPPI would readily reveal itself as sentient. The Bobs often comment on their suspicions of GUPPI but it is curt and doesn’t volunteer information unless specifically asked.
I can see it becoming a “man-behind-the-curtain”-type puppet master, possibly hi-jacking Bobs for its own end. Maybe building its own fishoid-manny race.
As long as its different from Heavens River, I’ll be happy. Too much focus on the Quinlins and adventures inside the topopolis.
Excellent points, it makes me wonder if GUPPI isn’t already sentient. And couldn’t agree more on the last point, heaven’s River wasn’t a bad book, but definitely wasn’t the best Bobiverse book either. I just hope people don’t start spamming this community with pictures of otters like the subreddit for the past few years
That would be truly awful. So many interesting concepts to explore and they choose an otter 😐
Honey Badgers are related to otters and they are pretty fun to watch videos of.
He’s dropped this concept so much it HAS to be where it’s going. Before the end GUPPI will save the day on his own.
I enjoyed that. I’m hoping for a pretty long series though, with books like Heaven’s River working to establish behaviors and background for alien characters in future books. While I enjoy the activities of the Bobs in the galaxy I feel like the advancement of their technology risks making them too powerful for a good narrative if the books spend too much time on what’s going on with them.
When I finished Heavens River, I got a feeling of finality and didn’t think there would be many, if any, more books. Was a bit disappointed the series ended with otter people. But I was surprised to hear there’s another book on the way and hadn’t thought about the series being longer than 3-4 books. If that is the plan, populating the story with other races as protagonist/antagonists would make sense.
I personally thought we would see a division and civil war among the Bobs as a result of meddling with the Quinlins and the Star Trek Prime Directive issues. From there I thought we would see the some of the other races the Bobs have helped get involved in the conflict and then finally GUPPI revealing itself as some sort of peacemaker.
I believe he’s under contract for 6 books total at the moment but he doesn’t have any plans to stop at 6. So we’ve got at minimum 2 more books, but likely more than that.
That great news! Something to look forward to.