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Down the Bright Way
In the deepness of space there are millions of worlds like our own - and each with its own humanity. They are linked by the Bright, an ancient pathway between the stars created by an ancient, godlike race known only as the Makers. Now humanity travels the Bright, uniting its worlds to a common desiny. But the Bright can also be travelled by those bent on destruction - those who have chosen a different path, whose sole purpose is conquest. Find out more about this title and others at www.orbitbooks.co.uk
312 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
October 13, 2022
The Bright is a linking interdimensional pathway between millions of alternate Earths, and the Wanderers are humans from various of these tasked with uniting humanity in all its forms and ways. When Wanderers come to the Earth of Billie and Kyle, Kyle decides to impersonate a Wanderer, as they are feted and given high status. Kyle and Billie form a faux couple as Billie is unaware that she is living with a fake. Trapped into a promise to take Billie to meet the most highly-ranked and million year-old Wanderer Jy, Kyle and Billie travel to the Bright for a meeting. There a coup starts with two rogue Wanderers determined to find The Makers, ancient beings who built The Bright, and break The Bright in two - for presumed crimes that Wanderers have committed on UnFound Earths. The plan was to kidnap some Wanderers to use as a key to arming an ancient destruct mechanism and Billie was collateral damage. However when the Wanderers choose Kyle as their vessel they make their only mistake as he is a fake. And this mistake could destroy all the Earths. Fascinating stuff from Robert Reed with chapters from multiple viewpoints to give you a sense of each character’s motivations and personalities.
October 2, 2014
I couldn't get excited about this book. The first half is a slow introduction to the characters and setting the scene. Then the pace picks up for a while but I found it difficult to maintain interest and eventually gave up. There is not enough development of the central idea to compensate for the lack of action or character development for me.
October 10, 2012
Drones on and on, building the story way to slow. Can't finish. Must have something a little faster out the gate. Got about half way, no further.
January 30, 2013
I just couldn't get into it.
June 30, 2022
Overall an interesting premise and pretty well written. I found the overall premise of the bright quite interesting and the fact the earth's religions were being replaced by a different one.
May 31, 2025
This novel had a lot of good ideas, but they were poorly exploited. For example, the different humans of the Parallel Lands: Creators, Founders, ... plus, Book I (the novel is cut into 3 parts) is slow and boring. The other two books are not slow, just boring. I couldn't get into the story, and the only times I did, it didn't even last 5 pages. I was more into the quotes at the beginning of the chapters (because each chapter starts with a quote, taken from one of the characters' diaries). That's saying a lot!
In the end, the novel is just dull, with some good ideas badly exploited. There are an infinite number of parallel Earths, all different, and this isn't really developed in the plot. It's mostly the characters and their relationships that are developed.
In the end, the novel is just dull, with some good ideas badly exploited. There are an infinite number of parallel Earths, all different, and this isn't really developed in the plot. It's mostly the characters and their relationships that are developed.
September 21, 2022
The blurb text for this book leads to different expectations for the story.
What the book is really about is interesting (abstract spoilers):
No conclusions are drawn in the novel, which I think is a good thing. It makes for a meatier "what if" to chew over.
What the book is really about is interesting (abstract spoilers):
No conclusions are drawn in the novel, which I think is a good thing. It makes for a meatier "what if" to chew over.
abandoned
September 8, 2019Why I didn't finish this: I love Robert Reed's Greatship stories, but this one is very Earth-based, and I think I thought it was a different book that I've been trying to find, so instead I got this weird parallel Earth visiting story which features a weird dude who wants to pretend to be one of the parallel-Earth humans instead of a normal Earth human.
August 30, 2020
De la sf oscillant entre les problèmes multidimensionnels et humains. Une bonne lecture, les InTrouvés resteront en mémoire, alors qu'ils ne présent qu'en toile de fond, la marque d'une bonne écriture de l'antagonisme
August 23, 2023
As many others have said, this is too slow to get to the point of the story. This would have been better as a novella; it feels like it's been stretched a little too thin in places, and while the ending is okay, I feel like it needed something much more impressive after such a slow burn.
December 30, 2013
‘In the deepness of space there are millions of worlds like our own. All are linked by The Bright, a pathway between the stars, created by an ancient godlike race known only as The Makers.
Now Humanity travels the Bright, uniting its worlds to a common destiny and a better future. But they do not travel alone. For others have discovered this gateway to the stars and they are planning to use it for a far more deadly purpose.’
Blurb from the 2003 Orbit paperback edition.
Reed takes the premise that, some time in the Earth’s distant past, an elder race seeded the Earth’s crust with a lattice of degenerate matter, the consequence of which was that somehow this lattice is able to admit passage – via a portal – to an infinite string of alternate Earths.
It’s a large-scale production contrasted – as in ‘An Exaltation of Larks’ with a neatly detailed portrait of small town America.
For a million years, the Founders, ands alternate species of human with large crania and furry faces, have been travelling the Bright – as the chain of portals is called – in both directions from their homeworld, uniting and civilising each Earth.
Jy, the million year old leader of one of the two Founder missions, has now reached our earth. There she is kidnapped by Moliak, her counterpart from the opposite end of the Bright. He has discovered an unstoppable civilisation of cyborg humans. Rendered almost invincible by augments and nanotechnology they have reverted to a savage tribal existence. Moliak wishes to destroy the Bright in order to contain them and stop them over-running the thousands of Earths already discovered.
Two American teenagers, Kyle and his date, Billie, are dragged into the kidnap and are taken along with Jy and her retinue on a journey through the various Earths, back to the Founders’ homeworld.
It’s not one of Reed’s best, but even here the characterisation is excellent. the people are real; they have flaws. Kyle is a fantasist and is pretending he is on of the aliens’ envoys, a Wanderer, in order to impress and seduce women. Confused adolescent males turn up a lot in Reed’s work and are generally portrayed with a blunt honesty. With some writers this may have made them seem heartless and cold. However, as with characters in other Reed books, Kyle emerges as a sad victim of himself. Reed makes us see his flaws – perhaps Reed’s own early flaws – through more understanding eyes.
Reed is also fascinated by the concept of near-immortal beings who bear comparison with similar characters in the work of van Vogt who also painted his highly colourful tales against absurdly vast backdrops.
The immortality issue is addressed, but does not satisfactorily convince that the central characters are over a million years old. All wanderers carry a hard memory unit which, if the body is destroyed or wears out, means that the mind of the individual can live on. Rather than explore the ramifications of this technology Reed uses it only as a plot device. However he deals much more effectively with the subject of immortality in later works such as ‘Marrow’ and ‘Sister Alice’
The structure does not help this novel since it is a multi third-person narrative in which we change characters with each section. With three or four characters this device may have worked but six or more gives the narrative a disjointed feel and it lacks coherence.
It is far more complex than it first appears since most of the main characters have secrets, some of which are not revealed until the end, but then again, this is another Reed device which he employs widely elsewhere.
Kyle’s secret we know from very early on, and we subsequently learn surprising things about other characters as the novel progresses.
Now Humanity travels the Bright, uniting its worlds to a common destiny and a better future. But they do not travel alone. For others have discovered this gateway to the stars and they are planning to use it for a far more deadly purpose.’
Blurb from the 2003 Orbit paperback edition.
Reed takes the premise that, some time in the Earth’s distant past, an elder race seeded the Earth’s crust with a lattice of degenerate matter, the consequence of which was that somehow this lattice is able to admit passage – via a portal – to an infinite string of alternate Earths.
It’s a large-scale production contrasted – as in ‘An Exaltation of Larks’ with a neatly detailed portrait of small town America.
For a million years, the Founders, ands alternate species of human with large crania and furry faces, have been travelling the Bright – as the chain of portals is called – in both directions from their homeworld, uniting and civilising each Earth.
Jy, the million year old leader of one of the two Founder missions, has now reached our earth. There she is kidnapped by Moliak, her counterpart from the opposite end of the Bright. He has discovered an unstoppable civilisation of cyborg humans. Rendered almost invincible by augments and nanotechnology they have reverted to a savage tribal existence. Moliak wishes to destroy the Bright in order to contain them and stop them over-running the thousands of Earths already discovered.
Two American teenagers, Kyle and his date, Billie, are dragged into the kidnap and are taken along with Jy and her retinue on a journey through the various Earths, back to the Founders’ homeworld.
It’s not one of Reed’s best, but even here the characterisation is excellent. the people are real; they have flaws. Kyle is a fantasist and is pretending he is on of the aliens’ envoys, a Wanderer, in order to impress and seduce women. Confused adolescent males turn up a lot in Reed’s work and are generally portrayed with a blunt honesty. With some writers this may have made them seem heartless and cold. However, as with characters in other Reed books, Kyle emerges as a sad victim of himself. Reed makes us see his flaws – perhaps Reed’s own early flaws – through more understanding eyes.
Reed is also fascinated by the concept of near-immortal beings who bear comparison with similar characters in the work of van Vogt who also painted his highly colourful tales against absurdly vast backdrops.
The immortality issue is addressed, but does not satisfactorily convince that the central characters are over a million years old. All wanderers carry a hard memory unit which, if the body is destroyed or wears out, means that the mind of the individual can live on. Rather than explore the ramifications of this technology Reed uses it only as a plot device. However he deals much more effectively with the subject of immortality in later works such as ‘Marrow’ and ‘Sister Alice’
The structure does not help this novel since it is a multi third-person narrative in which we change characters with each section. With three or four characters this device may have worked but six or more gives the narrative a disjointed feel and it lacks coherence.
It is far more complex than it first appears since most of the main characters have secrets, some of which are not revealed until the end, but then again, this is another Reed device which he employs widely elsewhere.
Kyle’s secret we know from very early on, and we subsequently learn surprising things about other characters as the novel progresses.
July 13, 2014
not a bad book
but just didnt do it for me
you know those stories where you read a entire book or sit through an entire movie and at the end you think you were just told a 5 minute story? I don't mean the case where time passes quickly but where you feel you haven't been told anything at all, or not enough...
That's how I felt after reading Down The Bright Way.
It has a number of great ideas and concepts, but somehow the overall premise which was built up massively didn't delivery at all, and what turned out to be the actual plot didn't justify all that built up.
A bit of an anticlimax.
Also, and here I must admit, maybe I am reading Reed's book not chronologically, but Reed starts to feel a bit like a one trick pony: although not all books / stories play in the same universe, there are certain themes (god-like humans, longevity, nano technology, augmented brains, hard memory) which come up over and over again, and it can start to feel a bit like deja vue....
Anyway, for me this was a forgettable piece...
but just didnt do it for me
you know those stories where you read a entire book or sit through an entire movie and at the end you think you were just told a 5 minute story? I don't mean the case where time passes quickly but where you feel you haven't been told anything at all, or not enough...
That's how I felt after reading Down The Bright Way.
It has a number of great ideas and concepts, but somehow the overall premise which was built up massively didn't delivery at all, and what turned out to be the actual plot didn't justify all that built up.
A bit of an anticlimax.
Also, and here I must admit, maybe I am reading Reed's book not chronologically, but Reed starts to feel a bit like a one trick pony: although not all books / stories play in the same universe, there are certain themes (god-like humans, longevity, nano technology, augmented brains, hard memory) which come up over and over again, and it can start to feel a bit like deja vue....
Anyway, for me this was a forgettable piece...
August 9, 2012
i must say, Mr Reed does like the "deep time" backdrop to his stories; in fact, come to think of it, it is what first appealed to me about his writing
briefly and without spoilers, this is a story of two possible results of asymetrical cross-cultural contact - i want to say "colonialism" but that's not true in the story's terms, although one guesses that the story retold by another author might have developed that frame. the political themes, if they are even intentional, are very muted, this is primarily a tale of other-worldly imagination, and unforeseen consequences.
an enjoyable light read.
briefly and without spoilers, this is a story of two possible results of asymetrical cross-cultural contact - i want to say "colonialism" but that's not true in the story's terms, although one guesses that the story retold by another author might have developed that frame. the political themes, if they are even intentional, are very muted, this is primarily a tale of other-worldly imagination, and unforeseen consequences.
an enjoyable light read.
August 6, 2008
Big ideas can be dull.
July 8, 2009
Science Fiction. Original idea, but not a favorite.
November 8, 2009
A surprisingly good book - I ran across it almost by accident but it has an intriguing premise and satisfying ending.
December 3, 2009
Looking forward to indulging in another novel by Reed - loved Marrow and Sister Alice.
July 16, 2010
One of the few Robert Reed books that I was engaged in throughout and where I wasn't wholly dissatisfied with the ending. A good yarn.
September 14, 2012
It took me months to read the first half it was do slow. There is a lot if plodding.before you get to the interesting bits just over half way through.
March 30, 2012
Medicore really; quite enjoyable whilst reading but completely forgettable.
dnf
April 18, 2022The plot could have been interesting, but the characters were dull and two-dimensional and I really couldn't be bothered to finish it.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews