A review by ornithopter1
Gateway by Frederik Pohl
3.0
The novel follows a prospector hoping to make his fortune within a scenario part goldrush, part deadly roulette. Humans have found a leftover alien station, with hundreds of docked ships – all fully functional. They don’t understand the navigation, but they know enough to get the ships to embark. Humans thus pilot these vessels on blind journeys, unaware of their destination, hoping to make their fortune by discovering a planet with resources or alien tech. The narrator is one such gambler, or will be if he can swallow his fear to sign up to a crew. We learn all of this via two timelines: a present-tense PoV from his time at Gateway; and a PoV looking back some time later, after he has hit the jackpot, but when he is unhappy and in therapy due to some unnamed occurrence.
I’m still struggling to get my thoughts in order after finishing Gateway. My reaction towards the main character? Very negative, really. He has a nasty streak of misogyny, which he doesn’t recognise, and a double-helping of cowardice, of which he is all too readily aware. It’s far from the archetypical swashbuckling hero. Which raises the question: can you enjoy a book written in the first-person when you dislike the narrator? I suspect my usual answer to that would be ‘no’. Somehow though I was always propelled to keep reading in this case.
That is likely due to one of the great strengths of the book: it has an unerring impetus, with a strong sense of building towards a culminating event. So good was that slow build-up in fact, that I’m not entirely sure the ending sufficiently paid off that due. Others will no doubt strongly disagree with me on that. The science fiction elements are well done and have aged well for the most part. Those elements, however, are far from the focus. In some ways the sci-fi is almost irrelevant, a colour painted onto the human story beneath. The character study is good too, but again not entirely successful - as I was somewhat alienated by it because of the character in question.
A very difficult book to rate: my emotional reaction to it and my intellectual one are quite at odds. This isn’t one to read if you expect a typical sci-fi plot, nor is it one to read if you’re just looking for an easy page-turner. It kind of washes over you, but you have to remain engaged with it to get anything out of it. I did find this satisfying and, having adjusted my expectations for future books, I will be reading more from Frederik Pohl in future. I’m just hoping next time I can get a protagonist that I actually like.
I’m still struggling to get my thoughts in order after finishing Gateway. My reaction towards the main character? Very negative, really. He has a nasty streak of misogyny, which he doesn’t recognise, and a double-helping of cowardice, of which he is all too readily aware. It’s far from the archetypical swashbuckling hero. Which raises the question: can you enjoy a book written in the first-person when you dislike the narrator? I suspect my usual answer to that would be ‘no’. Somehow though I was always propelled to keep reading in this case.
That is likely due to one of the great strengths of the book: it has an unerring impetus, with a strong sense of building towards a culminating event. So good was that slow build-up in fact, that I’m not entirely sure the ending sufficiently paid off that due. Others will no doubt strongly disagree with me on that. The science fiction elements are well done and have aged well for the most part. Those elements, however, are far from the focus. In some ways the sci-fi is almost irrelevant, a colour painted onto the human story beneath. The character study is good too, but again not entirely successful - as I was somewhat alienated by it because of the character in question.
A very difficult book to rate: my emotional reaction to it and my intellectual one are quite at odds. This isn’t one to read if you expect a typical sci-fi plot, nor is it one to read if you’re just looking for an easy page-turner. It kind of washes over you, but you have to remain engaged with it to get anything out of it. I did find this satisfying and, having adjusted my expectations for future books, I will be reading more from Frederik Pohl in future. I’m just hoping next time I can get a protagonist that I actually like.