All These Worlds (Bobiverse Book 3)

My Rating: 8/10

Amazon: All These Worlds (Bobiverse Book 3)

Author: Dennis E. Taylor

Publisher: Worldbuilders Press

Page #: 282

Published: August 8th 2017

Taylor’s All These Worlds picks up right where For We Are Many left off. It seems to me that the purpose of this chapter in the “Bobiverse” is to put a nice little bow on the many plot-lines of the many Bobs. This strikes me as odd since Taylor is releasing the next in the series in January 2021. I don’t know if Taylor was planning a sequel while writing All These Worlds or if that came later. 

We of course continue along the major plot-line concerning the existential threat presented by ‘The Others’. We also spend time following Bob-1’s relationship with Archimedes and the Deltans, Howard trying to explore a relationship with Bridget, Marcus warding off a totalitarian government on the Poseidon colony, Bill and Garfield continuing with their research, and a few new Bobs and extraterrestrial species.

I really enjoy this series and I think this book did a great job at wrapping it all up.

I appreciate the way Taylor makes you think about the morality of discovering extraterrestrial species. Most books and movies concerning extraterrestrials place humans as the underdogs against a technologically superior species. While that theme is definitely present when the Bobs deal with the Others, Taylor shines a new light on the topic by having the Bobs discover the Deltans and the Pavs (technologically inferior species). Bob-1 continues an internal debate about how much he should be “playing god” with the neanderthal-esque Deltans, while Jaques debates how much decision-making and help he should be providing the Victorian-esque Pavs. To me, these subplots are far more interesting than the major, yet played out plot of fighting the Others.

Another subplot that I really enjoyed watching play out was the relationship between Howard and Bridget. We get to watch Howard fall deeply in love with Bridget, while also battling the fact that she is “ephemeral”. And we also get to see Bridget struggle with the debate on what sentient really means.

A few things that I didn’t like about this book:

• We are expected to keep up with too many Bobs and too many locations. I found myself thinking “okay, who is Ferb and what is going on in Epsilon XYZ again?” This book would have been more enjoyable if it was more focused on the major plot-lines.
• Some of the technical stuff was hard to follow. It distracted from the plot when I was trying to follow the capabilities of the different Heaven models and the dreadnoughts and the crawlers and fission vs fusion warheads.
• The technical advancement pacing seemed kind of quick. I know this series spans ~100 years and we’re dealing with multiple advanced AIs, but floating cities and human passable androids, just to name a few, seems a little quick to me.

To summarize, I really enjoyed the different framing where Humanity is the more advanced species when dealing with ET species, but thought the large scale of characters, locations, and technologies, as well as the pacing of technical advancement, distracted from the major plot-lines.