GLORIOUS

The third and presumably final installment about a hard-science space odyssey whose purpose is to help spread humanity throughout the galaxy.

Previously, our starship encountered the Bowl, a vast, steerable object that wanders space capturing and enslaving alien species to occupy its unimaginably huge living space. Having wrestled the Bowl's birdlike boss species to a standstill in the sequel, Captain Redwing and crew planted a thriving colony there. Now, the starship finally attains its original destination, Glory, a planetary system whose orbital dynamics prove artificially engineered and enormously more complex than remote surveillance indicated. The Bowl, it emerges, directed by ancient, patient alien Ice Minds, has met the Glory system's controlling intelligences before—and they are not best buds. Like its predecessors, this adventure is clotted with technical detail (what was it Twain said about never letting the facts get in the way of a good story?), nearly all of it skippable. Biologists Beth Marble and Cliff Kammash (they're an item) visit the alien planets and encounter a parade of mind-bogglingly implausible critters, some lethal, some highly intelligent, some merely ridiculous, in a narrative peppered with borrowings, often annoying, from Brian Aldiss' classic Hothouse (1962). Redwing, meanwhile, heads for a gigantic living spaceship and a meeting with Glory's weird head honcho; this offers the authors scope to write impressive exchanges wherein resourceful humans augmented by AI are not altogether overmatched.

Full of ideas and often intriguing, if difficult—so, just about worth the effort.