All These Worlds

The final part of this trilogy seemed to me to have less of the humour of the first two books. Perhaps, though, that's just because everything is coming to an end, forcing some of the story into a more reflective mood. The action builds to a climax, with the Bobs facing off against the hostile aliens and finding that there's no easy solution for dealing with them, so the stakes are pretty high there too as a possible apocalypse for the human race approaches.

Tha's really the main focus of the book, but set against that are the more personal travails of some of the other Bobs on the colony worlds and alien planets out of the direct line of fire. Here the theme becomes one of what it means for the Bobs to be immortal, as the people around them age and die. It's reflected in different ways for different iterations of the original Bob, and the endings are by no means all sad. Indeed, for all the challenges and the sacrifices made along the way, the overall message is one of optimism, albeit tempered by pragmatic reality.

Although a few loose threads are left dangling at the end (and, indeed, a fourth book followed) this does a good job of wrapping up the arc, with all the major plotlines coming to a conclusion. Having said which, they're largely separate by this point, barely impacting one another and serving more as counterpoints than as parts of one big whole. But they all blend together to make something bigger than the individual parts. The first book in this trilogy was, to my mind, the best, but this is still pretty impressive stuff, covering a wide range of different themes.