The Bottom Line: Read this book if you are into the interpersonal lives of future dudes living in tunnels on an alien space station. Suffers from sequel syndrome.
Winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards, Frederick Pohl describes Gateway as his best work.
In this story, we visit an Earth of the near future. In this time, Earth is vastly overpopulated and a grim place to be. Pollution has destroyed our world, and man is now surviving on nutrients gleaned from petrochemical residues in the rocks.
Enough to say, grim pickings.
Bob Broadhead is a regular guy, a drone worker in the mines. Living a life of bare survival and nothing better, Bob wins a lottery and decides to spend his winnings on a ticket to the recently discovered Gateway artifact; a space station built millions of years ago by a now-absent race man calls the Heechee.
Hanging in orbit around Venus, Gateway station is a maze of tunnels, connecting hundreds of docks, each containing a small spacecraft. The craft have pre-programmed destinations. Whilst no-one understands the mechanisms involved in these craft, mankind has begun to get in them and head for outer space!
Unfortunately for the human “pilots” of these craft, some of the destinations programmed into these ships are extremely dangerous places to be. Many craft return on autopilot with dead crews, or maimed or mentally traumatized crews. Coming back alive is a slim chance in many cases, so why does anyone do it?
Money, put simply, is the answer to this question. The technology which is occasionally discovered at the outlying Heechee outposts can be exploited back on Earth. The Gateway pilots are paid huge royalties for these finds, which elevates the prospecting pilot instantly from penniless nobody to the super-rich.
Whilst this novel tells the tale of Bob’s adventures at Gateway, it concurrently follows his psychotherapy at a later stage of his life. Bobs neuroses are being slowly picked apart by a computerized psychotherapist, whose name is Sigfrid. As the two tracks of the novel proceed, they gradually close in on each other, to reveal to us both the events which befell Bob at Gateway, and the effect they had on him.
Living in constant terror of taking the spaceflights he has sacrificed his lottery winnings to have a shot at, Bob is waiting and waiting for “the right flight” to become available…low on risk, high on profit. Meanwhile, we watch Bob’s life on Gateway….this is essentially a small Wild West prospecting town, where the chief occupations of the prospectors are gambling, being intoxicated and having sex with each other, not necessarily in that order, only it’s in space.
As in all tales of someone’s daily life, Bob makes some friends and some enemies, has some adventures he is proud of, and some he’s not so proud of. Eventually, Bob must make his decisions and either take his chances in a Gateway ship, or return to his life in the mines, penniless.
Will Bob take a flight in a Gateway ship or give up and go home?
If he flies, will it bring him fame and fortune or premature death?
What is behind Bob’s deep and terrible neuroses…what happened to him on Gateway?
These and other mildly intriguing questions will be answered by reading “Gateway.”
So much for the plot….plenty of potential we might think!
This book is a quick read. The writing style of the author is concise and easily digested. Pohl writes with a flair for creating a page-turner. From as soon as I figured out what this book was going to be about, I was constantly hungry to discover what would happen on the next page. This very quality of the book turned out to be both a good and a bad thing. While I was always hungry for the next page, this novel failed to deliver the goods…not on the next page, nor indeed on virtually any page. Hopefully I can have you leave this review with a clearer understanding of what this book is actually about than one would come to understand from reading its back cover.
Whilst there are some strong points to this story it mostly reeks of missed potential. Given the excellent idea represented by the plot, the author could have gone a lot further towards building an interesting read. Where the potentialities of space exploration, artifact discovery and gadgetry are all available, instead we spend most of the story in the maze-like tunnels of Gateway Station watching the inhabitant prospectors cohabit.
Fascinating, I don’t think.
It may be that this story suffers somewhat from sequel syndrome. In this unfortunate state of affairs an established writer has the idea for a whole set of books. Having had this excellent idea, he or she thinks it would be a waste of time to use all of the excellent ideas in the first book of the series, and so the first book of the series ends up being little more than a hook to try and get people to read the rest of the series. It would have been nice to know this in advance. Hence I am writing this review to make it clear to you that this is my impression.
Now don’t get me wrong, this is not a book without merit. On some fronts, as I shall go on to describe, it has great merit. I caution only that you shouldn’t come to this book thinking it must inevitably be filled to the brim with gadgets, adventures and explorations.
This is a book which focuses strongly on the inner life of the protagonist, and his interpersonal relationships. Through the psychoanalysis which is ongoing throughout the story, we gradually learn that Bob is a troubled man. Or at least Sigfrid and Bob agree in the story that he is a troubled man. To be honest, as one reads the book, there is something of a gap between the supposed reason for Bob to enter therapy (a tortured soul) and the personal narrative by Bob himself, which is balanced. The author seems to have completely dissociated the narrative element of the characters portrayal from the supposed mental anguish he is living under. In short, the whole thing don’t jive.
This same choice of focus by Pohl on the inner life of Bob Broadhead gave the progression of the story a go-nowhere feel. Whilst, as I said, the book reads readily as a page-turner, the whole thing doesn’t really go anywhere in regards of the supposed central foci of the story.
If you are the kind of person who enjoys seeing how future events and situations might effect interpersonal relationships, you’ll enjoy this book. The writing of Bob is very strong, irregardless of how his self jives with his therapist’s opinion. Bob is likeable because he is realistically terrified by the unknown. All too often in science fiction novels the hero jumps into some alien crate and decides that no matter what the odds he will be able to handle the controls and deal with the consequences. Bob Broadhead is far more acutely aware of his own mortality and limitations, and that awareness and its consequences for Bob’s life are well written and warm.
The situation in which the pilots of Gateway find themselves reminded me strongly of the early astronauts in the space program. Plonked into a powerful rocket of essentially untested qualities, they were launched starward without any real control over the whole process. I found myself reconsidering the bravery and/or sanity of those involved, I might only hope that were I ever given such an opportunity myself I would make the most of it.
Another feature which Pohl added to this book was an interspersing of pages of out-takes. These out-takes would take the form of whole-page facsimiles of advertisements from the Gateway Gazette, excerpts from interviews with scientists about the cosmos and the Heechee, and report sheets summarizing flights made by crews from Gateway. Whilst I didn’t take much away from the advertisements, they did give added dimension to the book, but the report summaries of the flights were the only real teaser-taste of gadgetry and exploration the book got to grips with in the end, and for that I am grateful they were there.
All in all, this is a well written book in which the plot really goes nowhere and its potential is under-exploited.
I am distressed to have to report that the sequel syndrome works like a charm on me, and despite my mediocre rating for this book, I will be compelled to read its sequels at some point. This same curse afflicts me with regard to the Riverworld series. As the punk explains to Clint Eastwood, “I just gots to know, man……”
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 Hee...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.