Bob is an investigator living in a city known as Helen's Crown, a massive metropolis atop a planet-sized monument of Helen of Troy floating within the eye of the planet once known as Jupiter. When Bob investigates a series of inexplicable murders, in a city and a future not accustomed to the unknown, he is led on a circuitous odyssey where each clue seems to only produce twice as many questions. Shadowy organizations, interplanetary civil war, and encounters with the so-called "human variants" are but a few of the trials facing our detective, Bob, as he races against a proverbial sword of Damocles positioned above the heads of the entire galactic population.The story line of Bob the Galactic Hero is intermingled with maps of star systems and travel guides of Bob's galactic journey, articles on pertinent subjects such as future technology and speculative theoretical physics, a strange metaphysical children's book, and pages from a mysterious dream journal requiring the reader to ponder these surreal entries that seem both unrelated and yet profoundly relevant.This book is, to a considerable degree, a puzzle box. It is not what it seems on the surface. Bob the Galactic Hero appears to be a classic sci-fi novel but is in fact a treatise on philosophy, specifically the nature of the self, life and death, light and darkness, and the universe unbound and ever-changing. It is also a critique of human nature coupled with an optimistic remedy for transcending our own often iniquitous collective impulse.
