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| A suspense-filled novel. Source: Here |
“They were two lovely choices. One of them meant giving up every chance of a decent life forever...and the other one scared me out of my mind.”
Where to start with this book? One of the very few joint Hugo/Nebula award winners, and rightly deserved too.
Published in 1977 and written by Frederik Pohl, Gateway is set in a far-flung future in a overpopulated solar system. Earth is wracked by economic inequality and resource scarcity, with the rich able to access the latest medical technology and the poor with little option but to farm kelp or mine shale to grow the slimy bacteria that makes up the majority of these people's food. In the Solar System, humanity has discovered an asteroid hollowed out to form an alien space station with functioning ships within.
There are just a few small problems. We don't know how the ships work; what the different controls do or indicate; what fuel the ships run on; how much fuel the ships have; the destinations of the ships and whether they're still safe to travel to. People don't know how to reprogram the ships' courses, or whether they'll have enough food for the return journey - but the prospect of striking it rich with the discovery of new alien wares makes the prospect all too appealing. What Pohl does well here is dropping in strange new technology but visualising it in broad strokes rather than going into detail and therefore ruining the mystery.
Quite frankly, we don't even know how safe anything is, and that works in full favour of the book. Keeping so much under wraps, keeping this many blanks in our knowledge really adds to the aura of mystery surrounding every facet of the novel, and allows the reader to fill in the blanks themselves. We don't even see the aliens behind all this! What I found really effective was how nonchalant Pohl made the prospect of dying out in space seem - to our protagonists and everyone they know, it's simply a hazard of the book. The very premise itself, the fact that the possibility of dying horribly far away from Earth is far more preferable to staying there is enough to drive home how dark this narrative can get.
As for the protagonist, Robinette Broadhead, I found him flawed. Not as in executed badly but simply a flawed human being with his own neuroses and fears which I really appreciated, even if I didn't particularly like him very much. The main thrust of the story alternates between Broadhead's own experiences on Gateway and his sessions with A.I. psychiatrist Sigfrid (also my favorite character), slowly unfurling just what happened that traumatised Broadhead so much. We know that something tragic happened but the journey we take to get there is one I'd travel again, just to fully immerse myself in this strange world once more.
On the whole I found myself supremely satisfied with this book. As the first of Pohl's books I've heard it's a more than welcome introduction to his body of work, with an engaging plot, great well-rounded characters (it was especially nice to read older science fiction where female characters were more than just cardboard cutouts and were given roles that weren't subservient to men) and a killer premise that still rings with me now.
There are just a few small problems. We don't know how the ships work; what the different controls do or indicate; what fuel the ships run on; how much fuel the ships have; the destinations of the ships and whether they're still safe to travel to. People don't know how to reprogram the ships' courses, or whether they'll have enough food for the return journey - but the prospect of striking it rich with the discovery of new alien wares makes the prospect all too appealing. What Pohl does well here is dropping in strange new technology but visualising it in broad strokes rather than going into detail and therefore ruining the mystery.
Quite frankly, we don't even know how safe anything is, and that works in full favour of the book. Keeping so much under wraps, keeping this many blanks in our knowledge really adds to the aura of mystery surrounding every facet of the novel, and allows the reader to fill in the blanks themselves. We don't even see the aliens behind all this! What I found really effective was how nonchalant Pohl made the prospect of dying out in space seem - to our protagonists and everyone they know, it's simply a hazard of the book. The very premise itself, the fact that the possibility of dying horribly far away from Earth is far more preferable to staying there is enough to drive home how dark this narrative can get.
As for the protagonist, Robinette Broadhead, I found him flawed. Not as in executed badly but simply a flawed human being with his own neuroses and fears which I really appreciated, even if I didn't particularly like him very much. The main thrust of the story alternates between Broadhead's own experiences on Gateway and his sessions with A.I. psychiatrist Sigfrid (also my favorite character), slowly unfurling just what happened that traumatised Broadhead so much. We know that something tragic happened but the journey we take to get there is one I'd travel again, just to fully immerse myself in this strange world once more.
On the whole I found myself supremely satisfied with this book. As the first of Pohl's books I've heard it's a more than welcome introduction to his body of work, with an engaging plot, great well-rounded characters (it was especially nice to read older science fiction where female characters were more than just cardboard cutouts and were given roles that weren't subservient to men) and a killer premise that still rings with me now.
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