All These Worlds

All These Worlds is the third "Bobiverse" novel, a science-fiction story about a self-replicating spacecraft with an "artificial" intelligence created by scanning the brain of an early 21st-century entrepreneur and engineer who dies in an accident outside a sci-fi convention in Las Vegas.  In the third and seemingly final book (billed as the "conclusion" to the series), the Bobs must deal with a genocidal race called the Others along with a host of other problems.  In the first novel, the Bobs simply fly into space, bent on exploring it.  As the series progresses, they gain more and more responsibilities, ending up saving not only the human race but two other sentient species.

I was decidedly nonplussed at seeing the series end.  With so many series going strong at five or even ten books, the almost abrupt ending of the Bobiverse series disappointed me, not just that it ended but the way it ended (spoilers follow).  The Others are destroyed when two of the Bobs accelerate a planet the size of Mars into the star around which the Others are building their Dyson sphere, and the explanation of this is completely left out.  Where do they get the power to move a planet at all, let alone at relativistic speeds?  I get the feeling that author Dennis E. Taylor didn't know himself, so he only spends a single page on this plot device.  I'll still buy every book Dennis E. Taylor writes, but make no mistake.  All These Worlds is a flawed novel.