This is a book I didn't like. . . until shortly after I finished it. This is because the truth of the book - the conflict around which the entire story is based - only appears in the last couple of pages. That conflict centers around the implications of a black hole's event horizon. Everything else: the discovered technology of an ancient race, which makes faster than light travel possible, the AI therapist to whom the main character goes for help, the tunnel -ridden asteroid housing the mysterious Heechee space ships. . . all of this becomes an entire novel's worth of interesting background against which that one unifying situation is finally cast. So, after plodding though all of this for two hundred and fifty some pages, you close the book. . . you think a few minutes. . . and then you realize: 'hmm, that's an interesting idea.'

In this sense, the tale feels like it has the scope of a short story. However, Pohl gives it the space of a novel. And this is why I felt at times like I was plodding though developments that seemed to be going nowhere. Added to this is the fact that Pohl's book seems dated now, written as it was in 1976: the lines of computer printout that resemble BASIC programming, the revelation that a screen image is digitally generated, the overt notices about second hand cigarette smoke. All wold have been forward-thinking issues for the '70s, but for a modern reader, just dated enough to distract. I cannot say that Pohl is one of my favorite sci-fi writers. To me, his prose seems. . . soul-less, perhaps. I feel as though I should have read him back in the day. Realizing that there are additional books in this series, Gateway may be best judged against the context of the whole. However, taken by itself, I can't say I was 'carried off' by this one novel. ( )

Robinette Broadhead has managed to win the lottery, and uses his winnings to procure a one-way ticket to Gateway, seeking money to purchase a better life.

As to what Gateway is... it is a space station, created by the Heechee half a million years ago, and recently discovered by humans. The space ships the Heechee have left behind in Gateway are ridden by humans, who chance their lives against the numerous dangers of space in the hope of finding riches. However, since the Heechee were so advanced, humans have no real idea how to operate or control the spacecraft, making their operation equatable to playing Russian Roulette.

The story of Gateway is told in two alternating parts. The first part is that of a young Robinette Broadhead, leaving behind a life in an Earth struggling to maintain its current population, trying to make his fortune on Gateway. The second part, told as conversations in psychology sessions that Robinette attends, is that of someone who has made his fortune, and is living the life he always dreamed of, albeit with a lot of psychological issues.

The story of the younger Robinette makes for quite interesting reading - the premise of Russian Roulette in space is intriguing (and the story lives up to the premise), the idea of Gateway well-fleshed out, and life in Gateway is depicted quite well. The story of older Broadhead, however, does not always maintain interest as well as the first storyline plot, and is the sole reason that this book drops half a star to four-and-a-half-stars.

Also of interest are the numerous inserts throughout the book. The inserts mentioned range from text on signs, to letters, to newspaper advertisements, to various reports. Not all of them are directly related to the story, but all help to show and expand upon the background of the story.

Gateway has great world-building, an intriguing premise, an interesting plot and interesting ideas. Robinette Broadhead makes for an interesting character, too. It's quite easy to see why it won a Hugo Award, a Nebula Award, a Locus Award, and the John W. Campbell Award. ( )

This science fiction work was awarded both the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 1978. Apart from its abbreviated length, I found it be well deserving of the awards. The novella is set in the somewhat distant future, in which the Earth, with a population of 25 million souls is suffering from food shortages and converts hydrocarbons not into energy, but into food. Picture a “Soylent Green” society. To alleviate overcrowding, colonies have been founded on Mars, Venus and Luna.

While establishing the underground Venus colony, the remnants of a previous civilization are discovered. A “prospector” finds a self guided alien spacecraft which transports him to Gateway, some type of alien way station at which hundreds of self guided alien ships are stored. The story revolves around life at Gateway and the process of using the alien (Heechee) ships (they are capable of interstellar travel) to explore the galaxy. The pilots of these one, three and five man ships are compensated based upon the importance of their discoveries. Each trip contains a very high likelihood of mortality, but the rewards are great.

The story is told through a Gateway “prospector” named Robinette Broadhead, a former food miner who has earned his way to Gateway through a lottery. The chapters alternate between his “current” psychiatric sessions and flashbacks to his time on Gateway.

The premise of the story is excellent and the story is well developed. The chapters dealing with the psychiatric sessions are not nearly as entertaining however, and almost amount to filler. This brings us to the length of the work. At 275 pages, the book is relatively short to begin with, however, fully 60+ pages are comprised of “exhibits” which are interspersed throughout the story. These exhibits take the form of Gateway bulletin board postings, pages from what appears to be a Gateway orientation manual, and various trip reports and scientific findings. Many of these are largely filler, the remainder deserve only cursory attention. In addition, there are roughly thirty chapters, each of which begin and end in the middle of a page. You are left with what is actually a book with 150-175 pages of text. Throw out the psychiatric sessions and you are largely left with what could easily be compressed into a lengthy short story. The book can be read in its entirety in 5-6 hours.

There are several sequels to Gateway and I will possibly follow up the story, but suspect that two or three could have been combined into one standard length science fiction novel. ( )

I enjoyed this book immensely. It was a bit dated, but I think that the book captures space exploration much better than other books, that its a crapshoot and theres not guarantee. My one complaint, and its not so much about the book, is that it took the narrator so long to actually go out exploring! I started reading it an hour before bedtime, and I kept going one more chapter, just waiting for something to happen (the waiting was very interesting, and the story wouldn't be what it was without it). Needless to say, I finished the book that night and was not a pleasant person the next morning ( )

This is the second book in a row that I've read in the science fiction genre that included a psychologist main character. The book did not fascinate me as much as I'd hoped it would. However, I gave it a pretty strong rating because of the very end which was quite clever.

One of the reasons that I picked up the book is that it seemed to be a book that would include a lot of space travel which I ordinarily enjoy reading. However, it actually has much less space travel and more pre & post space travel elements. This was a let-down for me.

The author spends a lot of the book dealing with psychology. Through the analysis of the main character the reader learns more of the plot. I wish that the psychology portion of the book had been shorter. In fact I found myself wishing I could just skip those chapters and "get to the good stuff!"

Based on this book, I probably won't continue to read this series of books. However, I did find the book compelling at times.

My biggest quibble is that at around the penultimate chapter, the author dallies in a few mature themes. I don't think that it added to the story much. I got the feeling like you get in a movie when the main character says a few bad words just to get the proper rating. But, in the case of this book, I was a little mystified at the inclusion. Like I wrote, it didn't add much. ( )

Saga Heechee/1 ( )

The tale is told in alternating chapters. In one series, Bob (short for Robinette), the hero (more an anti-hero), relates, more or less chronologically and certainly soporifically, his adventures as a prospector in the outer reaches of the universe, trying to find artifacts of a long-extinct race of space pioneers called the Heechee. In the second series, Bob, having clearly succeeded in his prospecting career, chronicles his sessions with a robo-shrink, who is trying to heal the emotional wounds that are the price Bob has paid for his success. So the “Gateway” is twofold: a portal to the stars and an entry into the psyche – kind of like Dutch doors. Both series are interspersed with one-page squibs that consist of futuristic classified ads extracts of lectures & interviews, and snatches from user manuals of various kinds. These are presumably intended to provide comic relief. They fail. The primary narrative is sluggish and not particularly imaginative. The psych sequences are amusing as spoofs of Freudian practice, but, ultimately, are undermined by the Freudianism that pervades the character development. This book won both a Hugo and a Nebula (how in the world?) and spawned a video game, which I hope gave more pleasure than its progenitor. ( )

I thoroughly enjoyed this classic Sci Fi tale, which stands the test of time against supposedly more sophisticated fiction. The mysterious Hee Chee have abandonded artifects all over the gallery. Humans have discovered a spacestation, Gateway, where hundreds of ships have been abandoned. Although they don't know how to operate or guide the ships, there are no shortage of volunteers to take the ships out on potentially lucrative runs that are equally risky since there is no way of controlling the ship's destination. ( )

The gateway gives you the option to go to outer space and maybe becomes a millionaire and world-famous. But it also makes it really easy to get killed. The heechee, a long-dead species, left the gateway with many ships that can take you to the other side of the universe. There's only one caveat, you can't control them in any way, and if you run into problems you'll be the only one who'll know about.

Amazing wondrous book, one of my top reads ever. Full of excitement, the unknown, and some pohl's unique sarcasm.

Should be enjoyable by most, and its a relatively short read. ( )

While the novel is considered a classic in SF, it shows its age. The prose left me unmoved most of the time and some of the futuristic technology portrayed in the book does not come across as exciting any more.

There are two good points in favor of this book. The first is a stab at imagining human computer interaction when computers are getting darn close to being sentient, as slowly revealed in the protagonist's interaction with his electronic psychiatrist. The other is abundant, but interspursed, discussions of interesting astrophysical phenomena. Still, in my opinion, the book is weighed down by the (intentionally) unpleasant "hero". ( )

http://www.nicholaswhyte.info/sf/gate...

Gateway is about the adventures and loves of Robinette Broadhead on the eponymous asteroid, a claustrophobic community of prospectors desperately gambling on the winnings they might make from one of the hundreds of alien spaceships abandoned there. It is certainly one of Pohl's best books out of a long and distinguished career, where his influence as editor and fan has probably been as great as his influence as a writer. It was written between his other two great novels, Man Plus and Jem, and about the same time as the one Pohl book that should be read by anyone interested in the history of science fiction, his autobiography, The Way the Future Was.

The novel manages to weave three quite different strands of plot together. The main plot, Robinette's reminiscences of what happened on Gateway, is told as a series of flashbacks between his much later sessions with the robot analyst he dubs Sigfrid von Shrink. But the third and most interesting strand is the insertion of single pages of text which are on first sight tangential to the story: output code from Sigfrid von Shrink's programming, lectures on the mysterious vanished Heechee, official publications of the Gateway Corporation, and, most evocative of all, the small ads placed by the Gateway prospectors. It allows the author to show his world from a different viewpoint than that of the narrator, which becomes reassuring later in the book as we gradually realize that he is not an entirely reliable witness.

As a Belfast teenager attending a convent school twenty years ago (albeit a liberal and broad-minded convent school - heck, it even took us boys as well as girls) my exposure to same-sex relationships had basically been restricted to media coverage of the Jeremy Thorpe trial. Gateway was probably the first book I read with a positive and unembarrassed portrayal of homosexuality -almost the first explicit mention of the topic is in a small ad from a lesbian couple looking for a partner for "permanent trimarriage" with the ultimate object of settling in, of all places, Northern Ireland. Robinette's failure to deal honestly with his own (limited) homosexual tendencies is clearly shown as one of his (many) negative characteristics. It's a striking contrast with the utterly inept treatment of the topic in Haldeman's The Forever War.

Great science fiction makes you sit back and think about your own world - in Brian Aldiss' phrase, "Not 'What if...?' but 'My God! What if...?'" Gateway achieves this effect for me in the sensawunda of exploring the Heechee artifacts, and even more so in its vivid and believable portrayal of life on the asteroid, and the backdrop of the desperate, overpopulated future solar system. A favourite line of mine, from Robinette's account of his early life in Wyoming: "Funny. In the old days oil used to bubble right out of the ground! And all people thought to do with it was stick it in their automobiles and burn it up." I guess that the portrayal of the horrors of getting decent medical insurance is also in this category, at least for American readers. The brutal exploitative economics of spaceflight seem all too realistic (and must have been a bit of a bucket of cold water on the sf of the time).

As for Gateway itself: though the prospectors' economic activity is very tightly regulated, one gets the impression that Gateway is a more sexually liberated place than the rest of the solar system. In fact, it's slightly reminiscent of a university campus: the prospectors get there only after a long journey, have to go to lectures, and hope to spend only a year or two there before they "graduate". There are very few children, and lots of drinking, dope and sex. But of course there is a perpetual edge of dicing with death. Robinette's lovers on Gateway, like him, all face deadly danger: Sheri comes back from her first trip damaged but alive and rich; Louise metaphorically sold her own body and literally sold her son's to get to Gateway; and the last three, Susie, who turns out to resemble Robinette's mother, Dane, with the "warm and welcome circle of his arm", and of course Klara, the grand love of his life, are all abandoned in the final chapter, "going down" into the black hole.

Of course, the whole Big Dumb Object genre, including Ringworld and Rendezvous with Rama, seems somewhat post-Apollo now, and I rank the novel as "very good" rather than "superb". Other aspects of the story have dated too. These days the Gateway Corporation would have an immense marketing budget, with fan magazines, internet newsgroups, frequent TV documentaries being made by the most obscure countries, and also exposés by political opponents of the government in the five major shareholders (one or two of which may be democracies). The typewriter-style font in which the Corporation documents are presented now looks unprofessional rather than official. It's a bit surprising, two years before Alien, and especially given Pohl's own political activities, that the politics of the relationship between prospectors and Corporation is barely explored (there is one small ad for a "mass meeting" to demand "prospector representation" but we hear no more of it and presume that nothing happened). The environmental concerns, though less fashionable perhaps, are still with us. (Of course, he was saving the politics for Jem.)

Pohl is frank about his own mental health problems in The Way the Future Was, and the sessions with Sigfrid von Shrink are clearly based on real experience of therapy. Clearly, because in fact taken on their own they are not that interesting; reading about someone else's therapy sessions is probably about as exciting as hearing about someone else's dream, or perhaps reading the transcript of a legal hearing or a dull parliamentary debate. But the Sigfrid sections also raise the question of man/machine relations which (if I remember correctly) Pohl then pursues to a greater extent in the later books of the series. The idea that a computer could be used for therapy doesn't seem so absurd at first glance; a character in David Lodge's 1985 (non-sf) novel Small World comes to grief by having deep psychological conversations with the famous ELIZA (or one of her close relatives).

The insertion of pages of Sigfrid's output near the start of the novel remind us that he is in fact a computer, not a person, and that Robinette's treatment of him as a human being who can be dominated or controlled is misguided - so when Robinette manages to get hold of the override command we, but not he, are prepared for his disappointment when it doesn't in fact change their relationship very much. In the very last chapter, though, after Robinette has begun, painfully, to come to terms with his past, Sigfrid throws a new light on the question in the rather poignant final words of the book: "You asked me, 'Do I call this living?' And I answer: Yes. It is exactly what I call living. And in my best hypothetical sense, I envy it very much." ( )

Adventurous prospecting in space, wrapped inside a psychiatric counselling session, basically. All the trappings of a setup to try and exploit and monetise abandoned alien technology are shown here, down to the commercial advertising surround such an enterprise.

It is a very dangerous occupation, and the main character survives mostly intact, and has to deal with what happened to the people that went with him.

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2007/01/gateway-frederik-pohl.html ( )

Adventurous prospecting in space, wrapped inside a psychiatric counselling session, basically. All the trappings of a setup to try and exploit and monetise abandoned alien technology are shown here, down to the commercial advertising surround such an enterprise.

It is a very dangerous occupation, and the main character survives mostly intact, and has to deal with what happened to the people that went with him.

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2007/01/gateway-frederik-pohl.html ( )

Adventurous prospecting in space, wrapped inside a psychiatric counselling session, basically. All the trappings of a setup to try and exploit and monetise abandoned alien technology are shown here, down to the commercial advertising surround such an enterprise.

It is a very dangerous occupation, and the main character survives mostly intact, and has to deal with what happened to the people that went with him.

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2007/01/gateway-frederik-pohl.html ( )

Earth of the future is a rather inhospitable place. With populations soaring and without the technology for faster-than-light travel, humanity is outstripping the resources available to it on Earth. Society itself is demonstrates the dire straits in that only the super rich live comfortable lives, with a huge majority of the population relegated to dangerous, menial jobs mostly surrounding the cultivation of food products. For these disenfranchised masses, there is one beacon of hope - becoming a Gateway prospector.

During the exploration of Venus, mankind first became aware of the Heechee - an ancient, race that produced highly advanced technology some of which still survives in the caves and warrens they built throughout the galaxy. From Venus, a lone explorer discovered Gateway, and asteroid littered with over 1,000 Heechee ships capable of traveling phenomenal distances, but with controls designed and understood only by the Heechee. Taking a trip on Heechee ship was a serious risk, about 20% of prospectors were lost. But the rewards were fantastic - a single successful trip could set a prospector up for life. Such was the draw of prospecting.

Into this environment steps Robinette Broadhead - a lottery winner who dreams of parlaying this lottery winnings into the real score: a prospecting find. There's only one problem; he's a coward. He's terrified of actually getting into a Heechee ship. The fact that he might die a horrible death in the great blackness of space has paralyzed him into inaction. So he muddles through his existence on Gateway by taking menial jobs that pay enough to sustain him, and he finds a sugar mama who scored enough to lead a comfortable life on Gateway, but not enough to lead a comfortable life on Earth. She, too, is scared of taking another risk and their fears feeds of each other leading both to merely exist.

Woven into the story of his time on Gateway, is a series of Bob's sessions with Sigfrid von Shrink, Bob's computer psychiatrist. We know that Bob eventually goes out on a prospecting mission and scores big, but something devastating happens during at least one of those missions and those repressed memories are the root cause for Bob's litany of couch sessions. The the central question is what happened on that last mission?

Bob is very much an anti-hero in the Thomas Covenant vein. He takes very little action that could be considered noble. Like Covenant, he assaults the one person who cares for him. Like Covenant, he has opportunity after opportunity to step up and be a man, but he continually shirks responsibility and relies on snide comments to weasel his way out of situations. And (in a somewhat shocking revelation), he equates love with having something stuck up his ass.

I thought the book was good. It's not as oppressive as Covenant, and Broadhead doesn't stay as worthless as long as Covenant did - only two hundred pages as opposed to Covenant's 1200.

Read 1/2008 ( )

This is my favorite of Pohl's books. The concept for FTL space travel (i.e., we find a bunch of old alien ships that still work, but we have no idea how or where they are headed when the head out from our solar system) is original, and it opens up immense possibilities for storytelling. I haven't yet read any of the later Heechee books, which have gotten generally mixed reviews. The future society envisioned in this book is one where all but the very wealthy live short miserable frightening lives. The lucky ones get to take their chances on space travel, which is quite literally like playing a high stakes lottery, with huge payouts for the lucky, and ugly unpleasant deaths for everyone else. The narrative form is quite effective, alternating flashbacks (of the protagonist Robinette Broadhead's adventures in space), with his present day therapy sessions with "Sigfrid von Shrink," a computerized psychotherapist. The two story lines ultimately converge on the outcome of his third space prospecting mission, a mission that left him rich, famous, and profoundly depressed. Broadhead is certainly a flawed protagonist. By the end of the book we have a pretty good understanding of how he got to be the way his is, but I for one was not able to find much sympathy for him. ( )

This book really got me into the science fiction bug again. It was a chance encounter, picked at random from the local library based solely on the blurb on the back cover.

I can't rate this book highly enough, execpt perhaps for the length; it was a bit short. The book follows the main charecter, Robinette Broadhead, through from his tough and meagre life on a food-mining colony, through to a once in a lifetime opportunity on Gateway 1; a mysterious asteroid populated with little-understood alien ships which blast off to random and unknown destinations. Some of these trips result in riches for their occupants, others in death or disability.

The book is witty, especially the cut-scenes with Robinette and his computer psychologist which also offer a gurded insight into Robinnettes past, and his future.

The story has aged well considering that it was written in the 70's and doesn't suffer overly from out of date technology, a testiment to Pohl's abilities. The book runs at a good pace and despite the great ending will leave you wanting more. Read it. ( )

Link to a review on my personal website (might be in Swedish). ( )

Highly recommended if you are into the sci-fi of the 70s. It captures the reader from the first page and you just end up wanting to know more and more and more about the understory so you can't stop reading.

I will say this about the main character...I did not like him very much. I don't know if this was the author's intent but to me he came across as a jerk. If I met this guy on earth in the future, I'd be really tempted to beat him up (if I were a violent person).

so here's a brief synopsis with no spoilers:
Millions of years in the past, a species known as the Heechee existed throughout space and then just disappeared. As of the time of this book (there are two more to follow), nobody knows why they disappeared, and no one knows even what they looked like. All that is left of the Heechee are legends based on the artifacts of this civilization ... and to find these, one has to first get to Gateway. This is a kind of asteroid-type place discovered totally by accident, and what was novel about this place is that it seems to have been a base of some sort containing over 1000 Heechee ships...each programmed to go to a particular destination and hopefully return. But here's the problem: no one can understand the technology to know where any ship is going to go or how long the trip will take. In some cases, the ship might be out for a few days and return but in others, a ship might never come back. Worse -- a ship might return but the crew dies for some reason, not being aware of the possibilities of what they're traveling to.

So at Gateway, you can take a course on how to be a "prospector" and get into one of these ships and take your chances that it will take you somewhere where you will find the extremely valuable Heechee artifacts. It is to Gateway that the main character, Robinette Broadbent (Bob) comes after winning a lottery that takes him out of the food mines in Wyoming. He has had a Heechee fascination since he was a kid and this was what he really wanted to with his life. So Gateway, the novel, is his story, told in two different settings: with his AI shrink on earth some years after his time at Gateway, and while actually on Gateway. I'm not going to go into any more of this book, because you really need to read it to understand the story.

I have had this sitting on my shelf for nearly 2 years and what a mistake that was! Very highly recommended. ( )

Excellent classic SF and precursor to a long series by Pohl who was a superb plotter. ( )

The structure and concept of this book reminds me a lot of the Sparrow, but it's quite different in tone. The emphasis here is more on the sf ideas, which are very interesting and well described, rather than on the ethics and characters. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and polished it off in just 2 days. My only complaint about it would be the pacing is slightly off with the end feeling very rushed and not particularly clearly explained. ( )

RIYL: Classic 70s science fiction. Like a lot of older SF, the writing style is pretty flat, but with an interesting idea about an asteroid abandoned by aliens who left behind ships pre-programmed to go to different locations. Some people come back alive with treasure, others don’t. The story tracks a guy who struck it rich, but is in therapy because of it. I liked it, though it didn’t blow me away. ( )

Classic sci-fi, go tme right back into it. Ancient relics in space sending people off to random locations to try and find wealth and glory. Like any great sci-fi reflective of the aspirations of the time and contempory to boot. ( )

http://www.sfreader.com/read_review.a... ( )

This book delivers a fairly "hard" version of science fiction with particular devotion to the technology, typical of the author. So there is satisfying scientific detail, but it is unfortunately larded with a lot of interpersonal relationships and other irrelevance. In addition, there's a lot of flash-forwarding involving interviews with a robot psychologist, the significance of which only surfaces at the end, and which barely merits the additional material. In summary: Good "hard" sci-fi with no obvious "clangers" thinned out with some chick-lit and inconsequential psycho-babble. ( )