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A review by songwind
Gateway by Frederik Pohl
5.0
This is an excellently written, affecting and difficult book.
The prose itself isn't difficult. It flows well, and the literary devices like foreshadowing and metaphor blend in smoothly. In fact, I'd be willing to say it's one of the best straight prose books I've read in a while. (As opposed to prose of a more poetic bent.)
The story itself is an intriguing take on the idea of interstellar exploration. Exploring without our own solar system, humanity finds the remains of an ancient civilization on Venus. They eventually find a ship, and one explorer accidentally activates it. It takes him to a right-angle orbiting asteroid (planetoid?) that comes to be called Gateway. Gateway is stocked full to bursting with alien ships. Their courses can be set, but we don't know what the codes are. They can be launched, but they go where they're sent and come back. They don't change course once launched.
The parallels to Stargate jumped out at me immediately - but without the TV friendly safe worlds and magic translation, or instant transport.
Bob Broadhead, the narrator, is a rich man because of a successful prospecting mission in a Gateway ship. He's also a troubled man, and the story is framed in a series of trips to his therapist, an AI he calls Sigfried von Shrink.
The trouble is, Bob is not the greatest guy you could meet. He's selfish, immature, bad tempered at times, and frequently cowardly. He's also pretty irregular in his acceptance of these facts.
The threads of the story - exploration of space, exploration of Bob, and the history of spacefaring in this alternate future - are woven together quite tightly. Bob's reminiscences and therapy sessions feed into one another. Sometimes they foreshadow the other.
The book is also interesting as a historical artifact. So many of the world's attitudes and expectations of the future come through, and it's fascinating. Some of the concepts will be familiar to readers of 60s-70s era sci fi: sex as casual fun, relaxed attitude to drug use, and the idea that computers will continue to be hulking mainframes even once they're running anything.
What is missing is the romantic view of space travel with spacious ships, artificial gravity, and the like. The space travel reads like a more advanced version of our own efforts at that time. Cramped spaces, long travel times, etc.
By the end of the book I was left full of conflicting feeling. Sympathy, disgust, and anger toward Bob were mingled thoroughly. The same is true of most of the other characters as well, in varying proportions.
The prose itself isn't difficult. It flows well, and the literary devices like foreshadowing and metaphor blend in smoothly. In fact, I'd be willing to say it's one of the best straight prose books I've read in a while. (As opposed to prose of a more poetic bent.)
The story itself is an intriguing take on the idea of interstellar exploration. Exploring without our own solar system, humanity finds the remains of an ancient civilization on Venus. They eventually find a ship, and one explorer accidentally activates it. It takes him to a right-angle orbiting asteroid (planetoid?) that comes to be called Gateway. Gateway is stocked full to bursting with alien ships. Their courses can be set, but we don't know what the codes are. They can be launched, but they go where they're sent and come back. They don't change course once launched.
The parallels to Stargate jumped out at me immediately - but without the TV friendly safe worlds and magic translation, or instant transport.
Bob Broadhead, the narrator, is a rich man because of a successful prospecting mission in a Gateway ship. He's also a troubled man, and the story is framed in a series of trips to his therapist, an AI he calls Sigfried von Shrink.
The trouble is, Bob is not the greatest guy you could meet. He's selfish, immature, bad tempered at times, and frequently cowardly. He's also pretty irregular in his acceptance of these facts.
The threads of the story - exploration of space, exploration of Bob, and the history of spacefaring in this alternate future - are woven together quite tightly. Bob's reminiscences and therapy sessions feed into one another. Sometimes they foreshadow the other.
The book is also interesting as a historical artifact. So many of the world's attitudes and expectations of the future come through, and it's fascinating. Some of the concepts will be familiar to readers of 60s-70s era sci fi: sex as casual fun, relaxed attitude to drug use, and the idea that computers will continue to be hulking mainframes even once they're running anything.
What is missing is the romantic view of space travel with spacious ships, artificial gravity, and the like. The space travel reads like a more advanced version of our own efforts at that time. Cramped spaces, long travel times, etc.
By the end of the book I was left full of conflicting feeling. Sympathy, disgust, and anger toward Bob were mingled thoroughly. The same is true of most of the other characters as well, in varying proportions.