Gateway
by Frederik Pohl
Summary
The Heechee left. Nobody knows why, or where, or what they looked like. What they left behind is a hollowed asteroid parked near the sun containing nearly a thousand small starships, fully fuelled, in perfect order, with controls nobody can read.
You can climb into one and press the launch button. The ship will take you somewhere, at a speed and by a method no human understands, and then bring you back if the supplies hold. You might arrive at a dead rock, or a world worth a fortune in artefacts, or inside a star. Roughly one crew in seven does not return. The Gateway Corporation takes most of the profit and the prospectors take all of the risk, and they queue for it, because the alternative is a life of eating factory yeast on Earth.
Robinette Broadhead wins a lottery, buys a ticket to Gateway, and then spends a very long time not getting into a ship, because he is frightened, which is the honest centre of the book.
The novel alternates between his time on the asteroid and, years later, his sessions with a computer psychiatrist he calls Sigfrid von Shrink. He is rich. He is also destroyed by something he did on his last flight, and the therapy transcripts circle it until they arrive.
Pohl fills the margins with the texture of the asteroid: classified advertisements, mission reports, lecture transcripts and prospectus notices printed between chapters, so that the economics of the place, the fees, the bonuses, the funeral arrangements, arrive without a word of exposition.
The Sigfrid sessions are genuinely funny before they are anything else, since Broadhead spends most of them trying to defeat a machine that has infinite patience and no ego to wound.
Around three hundred pages, sharp, fast and unusually psychological for the science fiction of its era, when interiority was generally treated as an obstacle.
Best for readers who want a science fictional idea used to open a wound rather than to decorate an adventure, and a hero who is a coward in a way most novels will not admit to.
Historical Context & Significance
Gateway won the 1978 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the 1977 Nebula Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Locus Award, taking essentially every major prize available to it.
Frederik Pohl had by then spent forty years in the field as writer, agent and editor, having edited Galaxy and If and having written the satire The Space Merchants with Cyril Kornbluth in 1953. He continued publishing into his nineties and was named a Grand Master in 1993.
The therapy sessions were unusual for science fiction of the period, which generally treated interiority as an obstacle, and the novel's structure, in which the reader knows Broadhead is guilty long before learning what of, has been widely imitated. Four sequels followed, and a video game adaptation appeared in 1992 with Pohl's involvement.