Frederik Pohl (1919–2013)

This was my second Pohl novel and I enjoyed it a great deal. I picked it up to read because it was part of my goal to read 10 Nebula award winning novels in 2024. Pohl has the rare honour of having won the Nebula twice. I have also read his other Nebula award winner - "Gateway."

In a slim 215 pages, Pohl takes the reader on a journey through inner space and outer space. The process of transforming into a cyborg capable of living in Mars without a space suit is both fascinating and horrifying. show more There were some horror elements to the transformation. It is also left unclear whether or not the cyborg transformation is reversible or not. In addition to the cyborg big idea, there are also interesting explorations of Mars, artificial intelligence and computers.

I was also impressed that Pohl explores relationship dynamics. Our protagonist is a married man and his relationship with his wife plays a major role in the unfolding of the story. The physical and emotional aspects of romantic relationships play out across the novel in interesting ways.

Finally, I also enjoyed the ambiguous ending that explores the impact of AI (or rather self-aware AI) on the story and whether the AI is being directed or influenced by some other force.

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Fascinating idea of deep space exploration in which none of the actors actually understand how anything that they are using to explore actually works. The body of the story is told as a study of a pretty unlikeable character in two alternating timeframes. Rob is paralyzed by fear of the unknown in the earlier timeframe - both in terms of the space exploration and in forming relationships. The second timeframe is told entirely through sessions with a Freudian psychotherapist, with Rob living show more a life of luxury, but wracked by guilt and shame over something that he is aggressively avoiding.

Strongly reminiscent of PKD - I enjoyed it. show less

http://www.nicholaswhyte.info/sf/gateway.htm

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 show more 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."

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3493524.html

I really enjoyed returning to this book after sixteen years (as noted, there's a nostalgia factor for me). Not much to add to the above, except to say that two things are peculiarly missing from life on Gateway: there appears to be no police force, and no sex work (although Louise from Venus is a former sex worker). Neither omission seems at all believable for a frontier society. But it's still a Very Good book. show less

Very interesting twist on a Frankenstein theme as a volunteer astronaut is surgically and chemically altered into becoming the first "Martian". But Pohl goes deeper than that with a story that includes political conniving, psychology, and even a bit of theology as science goes up against human nature. And then he ends it with a rather cheeky one-two punch after the story's narrator drops a few last minute revelations. A fun read.