Gateway by Frederik Pohl [1976]
Ballantine / Del Rey
278 pages
Reader Response by Matt H. [v 1.5] from
Reading Odyssey
Rating: Recommended
Story Summary
About a half million years ago a mysterious alien race known as the Heechee left their advanced spaceships on an asteroid in Earth’s solar system. The asteroid is known as “Gateway” and the individuals who dare to visit it and pilot the Heechee ships are called “prospectors.” Heechee technology is poorly understood and there is no way to know where each craft will go or how long the journey may be. A few crews return with fabulous artifacts or scientific data and strike it immensely rich. Many more though, find nothing. And many return with dead crews or never return at all.
Bob Broadhead, the narrator, has lived a hard life as a “food miner” in Wyoming, but he has finally won the lottery. He uses his money to buy a trip to Gateway and fulfill his dream of becoming a prospector.
The narration covers two points-of-view. In one, the narrator recounts his experience on Gateway and his forays on the Heechee ships. In another, he is looking back on events during his psycho-therapy sessions with a computerized therapist he calls “Siggy.” The book is also interleaved with various short documents which convey additional background on the world of Gateway.
Critical Reader Response
Gateway has plenty of action but it is not centrally a story of space adventure. It’s really about Bob’s mental problems – their origin and their resolution through therapy. As the story makes clear, he is certainly no saint, but neither is he a monster. He is a virtuoso self-blamer who has been battered by life. He is unstable, and has sometimes violent relationships, paralyzing indecision, repressed guilt as well as issues of sexual identity. Add to this -- his station in life is low, his work menial, his cash minimal. And when he gets to Gateway all his problems are hugely magnified.
But of all Bob’s characteristics, one is especially relevant to his narration – he is a supreme wise-ass, and damn funny. His account of himself and his problems is profane, wide open and soaked in acidic humor. Poor Bob’s mental disintegration is a lot of fun. I suppose it could also be read with less underlying humor; he goes through a hell not
always described humorously.
Pohl keeps your eyes moving happily along. The unfolding of the information is well-paced and well-dosed. He sketches in the world skillfully and makes you want to know much more about Gateway, the Heechee technology, the missions, the training, lodging, food, the attitudes and motivations of the prospectors, the horrors of exploitation wrought by the Gateway corporation. He serves up all rather deliciously, always dripping with the narrator’s lashing irony.
I loved this book for the sheer grittiness of its world. Pohl paints an entrancing picture of unpleasantness with unerringly believable details. It’s an awful place described by someone who is used to awful places, and that magnifies the effect. Gateway is cramped and dirty, stinky, with trash-strewn tunnels, recycled air, food and water. One can smell the sweat of fear and stress of its unfortunate inhabitant. The people too are dirty and stinky, but they are solid and real. You understand their situation remarkably well.
On this cramped, smelly space station, where one waits for a Russian-roulette mission, showers are infrequent and expensive, but sex is mostly free and easy, at least from the narrator’s perspective. It’s a globally diverse group of men and women, many nationalities, gay and straight, wealthy and poor, highly educated and less so, civilian and military. All seem credible individuals, and no one gets a pass. No character in the whole book is a
type, not even vaguely. This is a feat of taste and skill.
When they’re not screwing, the prospectors spend all day drinking, smoking pot and cigarettes and gambling, sometimes with money they can’t afford to lose. (One can theoretically be “defenestrated” into space for not paying your life support fees.) They also throw a lot of heavy drinking parties for those departing and those returning. One can see a progressive, non-judgmental 1970’s party crowd in the Gateway prospectors, and it fits perfectly. The self-help references at times seemed almost too clearly transplanted from 1976 for a depiction of the future (Transactional Analysis, Est, Primal Scream, etc.) I admired the portrayals of otherwise cautious people persuading themselves to undertake very dangerous missions. You feel for them, and this freighted the few incidents of carnage with hefty impact. There are no villains in the book. One might say the Corporation is one, but even there lie occasional glimmers of individual humanity.
The writer shreds psychoanalysis in many ways, but at the same time the narrator seems to genuinely benefit from it. To me it was a wise and highly equivocal take. He reserves his most biting humor in highlighting the love-hate between patient and therapist. “Siggy” the computer will never desist until he arrives at a suitably Freudian admission from the narrator. There’s an echo of the feeling that psychoanalysis leaves you more messed up than you were before. When the narrator's central psychic wound is revealed, we learn it is connected with a split second life-or-death decision from his final space voyage. Of course he blames himself for murder. But an ingenious Sci-Fi complication is added at the very end, wrapping up the story nicely and hinting perhaps at a conditional salvation for Bob.
I enjoyed this book very much. It is well-conceived and executed and fully engaging. At the very end there was a hint of “pile-up” (a preoccupation with how everything will be wrapped-up in the next
n pages), but it did actually work out pretty neatly. There may be a slight hint of something lacking at first when you finish it (I wanted more revenge on “Siggy.” Pohl wisely resisted.) But this is one of those works that continues to make more sense and improve as one looks back on it.
