Character Driven Sci-Fi Adventure!! | Gateway (Heechee Saga)

Heechee Book 1: Introspective Characterization | Gateway (Heechee Saga) | Frederik Pohl

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	• Gateway (Heechee Saga) Frederik Pohl Del Rey, 2004 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 88 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Pohl Pulls off a Neat Trick

I remember Gateway fondly from its original publication, and I was a little worried about revisiting it decades later. After all, a lot of science fiction doesn't age well, as predictions of the future quickly become dated by real life events, transforming excellent books from literature to mere curiosities.

Gateway isn't immune from this, as its characters depend on lectures recorded on cassette tapes for their education! Worse, it features one of the most unsympathetic protagonists to inhabit a sci-fi classic. Robinette Broadhead's character defects are too manifold to list here. And half the book is devoted to Broadhead's futuristic psychoanalysis, and in the end, it proves to be a ludicrous red herring.

So why the excellent rating?

Because Pohl is an extraordinary talent, and his imaginary world of the future is a fascinating one. Here's an example of what I mean: "While I listened to the professor I could feel the wonder and the beauty of space. It was too immense and glorious to be frightening and it was not until later that I would related those sinks of radiation and swamps of thing gas to ME, to the frail, firghtened, pain-sensitive creations that was the body I inhabited. And then I would think about going out among those remote and titans and... my soul curled up inside of me."

There's not much one can add to that. Highly recommended.

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Character Driven Sci-Fi Adventure!!

Gateway starts and ends with the fears and guilt of the only survivor of a deep-space accident. With an undulating timeline, the reader comes to terms with the source of the main character's wealth as well as the origins of his guilt and fear. An ordinary dude in an extraordinary set of circumstances, Robinette Broadhead, has all the vast range of emotions of anyone set about on a course that can't be predicted. And the proof of the existence of vastly superior aliens and cultures is only the beginning. Quite possible my most favorite book of its kind!!PILATE: A Brutal Bible Tale

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Heechee Book 1: Introspective Characterization

This classic book is divvied up into two equally satisfying spheres. First we have the sessions between Robin and his computer shrink Sigmund. While writing psychology in sci-fi isn't new, this takes the mundane is a whole new plane. Not only is it insightful to characterization, but it also helps us understand the world Robin lives in and how he relates himself to women (who are pretty much objects to be possessed) and the Heechee (which are beyond possession). The second half of the book is the exploration of the Gateway itself as well as the gateways that the Gateway allows the explores to venture. Intermixed in all this activity, there are tidbits of interesting facets of life from the Gateway. Just little things like classifieds and technical information. This also provides another level of depth to the already deep story.

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Good premise, good climax, dull execution

This book started out with a neat premise: an ancient alien civilization has left a few traces behind in our solar system, including a tunnel-filled asteroid with a thousand faster-than-light rockets attached. The rockets hold one, three or five humans and though they have a navigation system no human can figure it out. People can ship up to the asteroid, board a rocket and launch themselves randomly into space. It's entirely a crapshoot where the voyagers end up - some ships come back with a happy crew and a ship full of pricy alien artifacts (so they go home rich), and others come back mangled and destroyed (or not at all).

The climax was a pretty solid idea, too. I found it extremely chilling, and the way the ending played out was suspenseful enough. Pohl managed to make his statement heard.

But I have a number of problems with the vision of future human technology (notably, they send people to their death instead of just placing a recording device in the rockets to make sure they'd come back safely...) The entire business with the psychologist computer (Sigfrid) struck me as very hokey, and the main character REALLY bothered me during these sequences. He spends practically the entire book pretending as though he doesn't have anything he wants to talk about, and won't discuss anything from his past. But why would he bother with therapy if he was so opposed to actually getting any therapy done? And there was some kind of subplot that was meant to explain his latent homosexuality, but that came way out of left field for anybody reading. I didn't find the psychology believable AT ALL.

In the end I think this entire story could have been reduced to a nice novella or even a short story: put the introduction, a little bit about the characters, then hit us with the ending and leave everyone thinking. Even for such a short novel it felt too long - there were little excerpts of 'Gateway classified ads' and also some transcripts of a professor educating potential prospectors about the dangers of the galaxy, but they did nothing for me except to interrupt the flow of the book.

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Descent slacker-in-space story

I picked this up at a used book store based on the strong reviews here. Although some readers have described Gateway as 'hard Science Fiction,' I wouldn't go with that category.

Pohl loves to critique contemporary capitalism / commercialism within a futuristic setting, and a lot of Gateway is based on commercial exploitation of alien technology. Like the classic Bladerunner movie, Gateway assumes a very dystopian, corporation-exploited future. Most humans are impoverished and toil about in manual labor jobs. So bleak is their outlook in the food mines that they are excited to jump at the chance to take huge risks at piloting undocumented alien spacecraft on missions that might bring them financial riches. Sadly, many of these missions result in death for all crew members.

This is my first Frederik Pohl full-length-book experience and it had me running back to the used bookstore to find the sequel, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon. I had read one of his short stories before (1954- 'Tunnel Under the World'), and found Gateway to come across somewhat dated as that story did. Both are great reads, but it's frequently jarring to read all the references to cigarette and pot smoking while travelling in a closed container at faster-than-light speed.

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Gateway opened on all the wealth of the Universe...and on reaches of unimaginable horror. When prospector Bob Broadhead went out to Gateway on the Heechee spacecraft, he decided he would know which was the right mission to make him his fortune. Three missions later, now famous and permanently rich, Robinette Broadhead has to face what happened to him and what he is...in a journey into himself as perilous and even more horrifying than the nightmare trip through the interstellar void that he drove himself to take!
THE HEECHEE SAGA
Book One:GATEWAY
Book Two:BEYOND THE BLUE EVENT HORIZON
Book Three: HEECHEE RENDEZVOUS
Book Four: THE ANNALS OF THE HEECHEE

From the Paperback edition.

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