All These Worlds

Dennis E. Taylor

Completed 9/10/2018, Reviewed 9/10/2018

3 stars

This is the third book of the Bobiverse Trilogy.  It was a fitting end to a fun series.  It’s filled with action, adventure, and even some romance.  Yes, one of the Bob’s falls in love.  It’s more of the same as the second book, kind of a comic-space opera.  And it still suffers from the lack of intensity of the first book, though it makes up for it in an action-packed ending.  It kept my interest and I had a hard time putting it down at the end of the night. 

Again the book picks up a little after the second book, For We Are Many.  The first Bob is kicked off his planet of the Deltans, but returns to live with them as a Deltan android.  Androids construction has become so advanced that a Bob can make a lifelike model of anything and transfer his entity into the android, while still controlling his primary ship and other drones.  Only Archimedes, the Deltan with whom he had initial contact, knows his identity.  Everyone else believes he’s just another Deltan named Robert.  This is one of the best plotlines.  He can still guide the Deltans in a quiet manner, not giving them profound knowledge, but just easing them gently along the way. 

Riker, now known only as Will, is still helping the humans from Earth leave their dying planet, but it is complicated by the Others.  The Others are the species that invades planets, eating the inhabitants, and scavenging the planet for its natural resourses so they can build their new Dyson disk home world (think Ringworld).  Several Bobs tried unsuccessfully to stop the Others from ravaging one planet, and in the course of events the Others figured out who they were and where they came from.  So their plan is to invade Earth next.  There are still fourteen million inhabitants left on Earth and getting them all off before the invasion is tricky business.

My other favorite Bob is still Howard, the one who falls in love with a human woman on Vulcan.  Her husband dies and she and Howard grow closer together.  With the android technology, he can now pal around with her physically.  They fall deeply in love, and he tries to convince her to have her consciousness uploaded to a computer as well when she dies.  Her children are not too keen on the idea and it has sort of scandalized the planet. 

I give the book three stars out of five.  It’s good.  It’s a lot of fun, but when all is said and done, it’s fluff.  It’s very entertaining, but nothing earth shattering.  The quick cuts began to wear me out a little.  It makes for fast reading, but in the end, I just wanted to get on with each plotline.  And there are a couple of plotlines that I didn’t mention.  It would make a great television series, or trio of movies.  I highly recommend this for most people because of the sheer fun of it.