Recent reading, notable titles in red as usual:

Frederik Pohl, Gateway
Frederik Pohl, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon
Frederik Pohl, Heechee Rendezvous
Frederik Pohl, The Gateway Trip
Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End
Martin J. Whitman and Martin Shubik, The Aggressive Conservative Investor

Five science fiction novels and a recently reprinted technical manual on value investing. Pohl's Gateway (1977), won both the Nebula and the Hugo award; I'm not sure how I avoided it for so long. I think I always associated Pohl with figures like Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg, science fiction's equivalent of groups like the Rolling Stones and the Eagles, who were once critically significant, or at least interesting, but have now overstayed their welcome by decades. Pohl turns out to have much more in common with the Strugatskys and Philip K. Dick than he does with Asimov and Silverberg, and Gateway joins an extremely short list of favorite works of science fiction.

Gateway's premise is follows: an alien race, the Heechee, dropped into the solar system some millenia ago, then left in a hurry, without taking all of their technology along with them. In the early twenty-first century, an asteroid, Gateway, is discovered by Terran space explorers. Gateway is a parking garage for Heechee space ships, hundreds of them, most of which are tiny, approximately the size of a bachelor apartment. The spaceships' navigational controls make no sense to humans, but operating them is simplicity itself: you climb in, move a lever, and the spaceship automatically flies itself, faster than light, to a preprogrammed destination. Some destinations are interesting to people: hospitable planets; curious astrophysical phenomena. Some are less so: black holes; dead planets drenched in ultraviolet radiation; supernovae. Some times the trip out and back takes too long, and the pilot runs out of oxygen...or starves.

Prospective Gateway pilots regularly arrive on the asteroid from Earth, where they are charged for room, board, and oxygen. Anyone whose credit runs out goes out the nearest airlock. So there is a constant, pressing need to fly missions in the Heechee spaceships in search of economically exploitable Heechee artifacts...missions which, on average, have about a 35% mortality rate, not counting those pilots who come back technically alive but irradiated and/or crazy.

I think Gateway is as good a science fiction novel as any I have ever read. Successive volumes in the "Heechee Saga" are imaginative, but less good; the later books are serviceable space opera, but suffer from too much explaining, which detracts from Gateway's powerful air of mystery and unease.

Not yet read: the 4th volume in the "Saga," Annals of the Heechee, and Pohl's latest Gateway novel (after a gap of 16 years!), The Boy Who Would Live Forever.
- posted by cjb @ 10:49 AM