Review: Gateway

Gateway by Frederik Pohl
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was an excellent story and I really liked the protagonist, Rob, all apart from his attitude towards females which was a major disappointment. There's one particularly unfortunate scenario which I'll comment on briefly below.

The story is told in two parts which the narrative flips between. One part is the story of Rob's involvement with Gateway, the other part follows Rob's therapy sessions later in life. The chapters also contain a variety of randomly placed info-dump snippets; things like instruction manuals, classified ads, news reports, and other everyday tidbits of life in this imagined future. I'm not usually a big fan of split narratives, nor of breaking up a narrative with little snippets like this BUT I have to admit that sometimes it works really well and that I think it does so in this story.

"Him and his dumb questions. He acts so wise and subjective but what does a teddy-bear know?"

Rob's therapist is a robotic A.I. called Sigfrid and I just loved the relationship between these two. As well as the classic tension between a therapist and a patient there is also an element of doubt, on Rob's part, that a programmed therapy bot can truly understand his problem at all. Not to spoil anything but Rob is gradually more and more impressed by Sigfrid's abilities and the conclusion of the therapy thread is fantastic.

"Listen to them! Sigfrid, you crazy old clanker, I do nothing but listen to them. I want them to say they love me. I even want them to say they hate me, anything, just so they say it to me, from them, out of the heart. I'm so busy listening to the heart that I don't even hear when somebody asks me to pass the salt."

Now, if I've got this right.... remnants of the existence of a species called the Heechee were first found on Venus, but later more evidence was found throughout the solar system. One of these traces is a structure called Gateway and a colony society has built up around it.

Rob wins the lottery and uses his winnings to fund a one way trip to Gateway where he takes up the first contract offered to him by the Corporation, without even reading it. However, after this hasty sign up Rob proceeds to repeatedly delay choosing an actual mission for most of the story.

"WHAT DOES THE CORPORATION DO?
The purpose of the Corporation is to exploit the spacecraft left by the Heechee, and to trade in, develop, or otherwise utilize all artifacts, goods, raw materials, or other things of value discovered by means of these vessels."

From Gateway crew are trained up to "pilot" recovered Heechee craft, but the missions generally have low odds of survival. In the chance that a crew does survive the pay-off is substantial.

"We never did see the worst of it, we only heard about it. One man was still inside the ship. All over the inside of the ship. He had been literally spattered around the control room, and his remains had been baked onto the walls."

There are plenty of very well described gory scenes, if you're into that sort of thing. I am. But actually the descriptive language is excellent in general.

"As you know from what we've been hearing in class, the ships have automatic return. Wherever you go, you just squeeze the go-teat and you come straight back here."

Haha. "go-teat" - these ships sound like fun. They basically pilot themselves and then you squeeze the teat when you want to cum home.

"It is strange that no one has ever found a trace of another intelligent creature. But in eighteen years, upwards of two thousand flights, no one has. There are about a dozen habitable planets, plus another hundred or so that people could live on if they absolutely had to, as we have to on Mars and on, or rather in, Venus. There are a few traces of past civilizations, neither Heechee nor human. And there are the souvenirs of the Heechee themselves. At that, there's more in the warrens of Venus than we've found almost anywhere else in the Galaxy, so far. Even Gateway was swept almost clean before they abandoned it."

The Heechee have done a pretty good job of covering their tracks as far as leaving no trace of organic matter behind, but it turns out that the rest of the galaxy is also rather barren, at least as far as we've searched in this story.

"There used to be a jokey kind of book they sold at the fairs when I was a kid. It was called Everything We Know About the Heechee. It had a hundred and twenty-eight pages, and they were all blank."

"Presumably the Heechee could change course when they wanted to, but how they did it is one of those great unanswered questions about the Heechee, like why did they tidy everything up before they left? Or what did they look like? Or where did they go?"

Alright, anyway. I better say something about Rob's misogynistic views. Have this quote, on his general attitude, first:

"and I would feel the inside of my eyes change the picture I was seeing, and what I would see would be the female equivalent of myself: a coward, given the greatest chance a human could have, and scared to take advantage of it."

The female equivalent of myself certainly isn't any more of a coward than I am, but Rob seems to think that would be the case. Ok. Whatever. Old attitude and I'll let it slide. But then we witness a very rough scene with the love of his life, Klara.

"...maybe I went to bed with him a few times. It doesn't change how I feel about you."
"It changes how I feel about you, Klara."

Ok, so Rob feels cheated, that's relatable and understandable. However, the scene that follows the quote above is intense and likely to trigger anyone who's been around domestic violence. I just didn't see it coming. And even though that may be tough to read, it's not unrealistic. It happens. But instead of getting an apologetic recognition of the mistake, we get the following half-assed justification:

"The reason wolves don't kill each other off is that the smaller and weaker wolf always surrenders. It rolls over, bares its throat and puts its paws in the air to signal that it is beaten. When that happens the winner is physically unable to attack anymore. If it were not that way, there wouldn't be any wolves left. For the same reason men don't usually kill women, or not by beating them to death. They can't. However much he wants to hit her, his internal machinery vetoes it. But if the woman makes the mistake of giving him a different signal by hitting him first-"

She hit me first, so...? So she deserved my wrath? Gross. Well. There will be an apology but it isn't exactly immediately forthcoming.

"I couldn't imagine our ever being lovers again. But what I finally decided I wanted was to apologize."

It might be too much for some readers but do be aware that it isn't a large part of the story. And the two do reunite later in the story. Also once you pass it both the Heechee saga and the therapy thread really do get interesting.

"The trouble with getting to know Doreen was that I had got to know her. She was nice, and a hell of a racing pilot, but she wasn't Klara Moynlin."

Now, while I'm on shit that you might find uncomfortable to read. If you're a bit disconnected from reality you may not enjoy that there is plenty of casual sex and social joint smoking referenced in the story.

"There are supposed to be eight hundred kilometers of tunnels inside Gateway. You wouldn't think there could be that many in a little chunk of rock that's only about ten kilometers across. But even so, only about two percent of Gateway is airspace; the rest is solid rock. I saw a lot of those eight hundred kilometers."

The science is mostly very good, hard stuff. I didn't find any of it difficult to understand but it may help to have a basic grasp of a few fundamental ideas.

"they had not merely bent the gravity well, they had wrapped it around themselves like a blanket." - a description of black holes which I thought was wonderful.

The ending brings the Gateway story and the therapy sessions to the same point. Both threads are ended very strongly and für that reason this story gets a very high recommendation from me. Personally, I can't wait to get into the rest of the Heechee saga books, (Although I will have to wait while I finish a few other book club reads.)

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