Subject: DOWN THE BRIGHT WAY by Ralph Reed

From: [email-masked] (Evelyn C Leeper +1 908 957 2070)
Date: 4 Mar 92 22:28:52 GMT

DOWN THE BRIGHT WAY by Ralph Reed
                        A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
			 Copyright 1992 Evelyn C. Leeper

        Another reviewer has recently suggested this as a possible Hugo
   contender.  Well, in this world anything is possible, but I have to disagree
   on this one.  This novel suffers (for me, at any rate) from the same fault
   as Reed's other novel, BLACK MILK.  (Each, by the way, contains an excerpt
   from the other at the end of the book, possibly to confuse anyone who might
   skip to the end to find out what happened.) This fault is that after setting
   up an interesting premise with a lot of promise, Reed does nothing with it.
   In DOWN THE BRIGHT WAY, Reed postulates an infinite number (more or less) of
   parallel Earths connected by the Bright, a sort of highway that one can
   travel between them.  Millions of years after the creation of the Bright,
   the Wanderers send out two parties, one in each direction of the Bright, to
   try to find the Makers who created it.  (I find myself asking why the Bright
   is linear.  Some ordering of Earths along a line--a single dimension doesn't
   seem to make a lot of sense.)

        Now to my mind the most exciting possibilities of this story are in the
   parallel Earths.  But these are almost entirely glossed over so that all the
   rivalries and conspiracies among the Wanderers can be developed.  The only
   time the parallel Earths become important is when Reed needs something to
   menace the entire set-up.  But for that, this seems more like a spy thriller
   than a sweeping science fiction novel.  There's nothing wrong with spy
   thrillers, but why bother with the science fiction part?  It's as though you
   sent a team of time travelers back to ancient Egypt and then had them sit in
   their tent arguing about who was the team leader the whole time, pausing
   only briefly to notice a huge number of frogs, swarms of flies, a rain of
   fire, a swarm of locusts, and finally what seems to be a large number of
   people walking by.  The team interactions might normally be interesting, but
   the reader wants to rip open the tent door and go outside.

   %T      Down the Bright Way
   %A      Ralph Reed
   %C      New York
   %D      April 1991
   %I      Bantam Spectra
   %O      paperback, US$4.50
   %G      ISBN 0-553-28923-3
   %P      312pp

Evelyn C. Leeper   |   +1 908 957 2070   |   att!mtgzy!ecl or [email-masked]