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A review by christopherc
Gateway by Frederik Pohl
2.0
The big idea of Frederik Pohl's 1977 novel Gateway is an alien relic discovered orbiting the sun. This eponymous space station holds hundreds of alien ships that human explorers find are capable of faster-than-light travel and can be directed towards certain preset destinations. Some of the ships come back with fantastic new technologies that make their finders rich, but most ships either don't come back at all, or come back with a dead crew. In this dystopian vision of the future, when the poor masses of an overpopulated Earth slave away in mines to barely stay alive, many are willing to take their chances for a shot at the good life.
The protagonist of Gateway is Robinette Broadhead, a former miner who has realized his dream of working as a prospector in spite of the poor odds. As the novel opens, he is back on Earth talking to a psychiatrist, now fantastically wealthy from one of his finds, but traumatized by something that happened on a trip out from Gateway. In the first person, his life is told in flashbacks that alternate with psychoanalytical sessions. His psychiatrist is a computer program, inspired by the old ELIZA program that Joseph Weizenbaum wrote in the Sixties.
The ending of this book, the big event that so scarred Broadhead and has been repeatedly foreshadowed, is bizarrely rushed, only a couple of pages of sketchy description. It is almost as if Pohl was struggling to meet a deadline. Most of Broadhead's sessions with his psychoanalyst repetitive, only serving to fill the page count. This story could have been packed into a novella and would have been all the better for it.
I'm really surpised that Gateway was showered with accolades upon publication. Perhaps part of that is how edgy it may have seemed to a 1977 audience. Not only does Pohl write of a future where gay relationships are as ordinary as straight ones, but he puts some gay sex fantasies in the head of his mainly straight protagonist. Everyone in the book has multiple sex partners and smokes grass. Broadhead is a twisted guy, one moment drawing the reader's sympathy and the next beating up his girlfriend or attacking another girlfriend with a knife. It is thus more adventurous than most science-fiction. However, the dialogue that Pohl writes is essentially stuck in the mid-20th century when this writer was starting out, and the descriptive prose is fairly pulp.
One might be attracted to read Gateway because it found a place in the canon of science-fiction, and the speculative ideas of the book are interesting enough, but be aware that it suffers from the usual deficiences of the genre and then some.
The protagonist of Gateway is Robinette Broadhead, a former miner who has realized his dream of working as a prospector in spite of the poor odds. As the novel opens, he is back on Earth talking to a psychiatrist, now fantastically wealthy from one of his finds, but traumatized by something that happened on a trip out from Gateway. In the first person, his life is told in flashbacks that alternate with psychoanalytical sessions. His psychiatrist is a computer program, inspired by the old ELIZA program that Joseph Weizenbaum wrote in the Sixties.
The ending of this book, the big event that so scarred Broadhead and has been repeatedly foreshadowed, is bizarrely rushed, only a couple of pages of sketchy description. It is almost as if Pohl was struggling to meet a deadline. Most of Broadhead's sessions with his psychoanalyst repetitive, only serving to fill the page count. This story could have been packed into a novella and would have been all the better for it.
I'm really surpised that Gateway was showered with accolades upon publication. Perhaps part of that is how edgy it may have seemed to a 1977 audience. Not only does Pohl write of a future where gay relationships are as ordinary as straight ones, but he puts some gay sex fantasies in the head of his mainly straight protagonist. Everyone in the book has multiple sex partners and smokes grass. Broadhead is a twisted guy, one moment drawing the reader's sympathy and the next beating up his girlfriend or attacking another girlfriend with a knife. It is thus more adventurous than most science-fiction. However, the dialogue that Pohl writes is essentially stuck in the mid-20th century when this writer was starting out, and the descriptive prose is fairly pulp.
One might be attracted to read Gateway because it found a place in the canon of science-fiction, and the speculative ideas of the book are interesting enough, but be aware that it suffers from the usual deficiences of the genre and then some.