Stats
Gateway
by Frederik Pohl
1978 Hugo
Award Winner (1977 Nebula Award Winner)
Got it
from: Public Library
278 Pages
Humans
have been living in tunnels on Venus for a number of years, but when suddenly
ancient alien spacecraft are uncovered, the universe, just as suddenly, gets a
heck of a lot smaller. Robinette
Broadhead makes his way out to the Gateway asteroid/base in hopes of striking
it rich as a prospector and leaving his problems behind. Once he arrives though, he realizes it’s not quite
as simple or as safe as he’d hoped. Alternating
between Robinette’s prospecting journeys from Gateway and therapy sessions with
a computer some years after later, we slowly unravel the details that have
plunged him into a stiflingly dark depression since leaving.
How much do I care about this guy?
I almost
always love super advanced computers/self-aware machines. If I have not made this clear in the past,
let me do so now. I don’t even care if
it is a really anachronistic view of computers – if you make that personality
real enough or you give that computer the power to do cool enough stunts, I will
be drooling all over the pages. I’m not
sure when this obsession started, but I am thoroughly stuck in it and I don’t
care to get out.
So when Gateway begins with a computer named “Sigfrid”
putting Robinette through a Freudian psychoanalysis session and it’s a pretty sassy program. I knew I was going to have fun with this one.
My
immediate fascination with Sigfrid may have actually worked against my interest
in Robinette. He is kind of a jerk and
just not that interesting to me, or at least he wasn’t as I read through this
time. He isn’t completely colorless, he’s
just a really immature guy and maybe a little bit of an anti-hero who had
trouble currying any of my favor (come to think of it though, Pohl probably
intended that very much). I think there
was probably some potential for him, but the way he kept making it so hard to
get to know more about Sigfrid made me more than a little frustrated.
The
therapy sessions did go a long way to humanizing Robinette in the end though. And that was my take-away here; even once the
entirety of space is opened up to us, we are still going to need to deal with
our problems, parents are still going to suck (I should know) and people are
still going to just have sex and use drugs rather than face up to their issues. Scalzi said it: “I’m still going to need to
take out the trash.”
For those
who have read this, the ending, which I hope I will not give away for those who
haven’t, gave me a little of a Hitchcock’s Psycho
feeling – you know the feeling of being made to believe we should care about one
person and then abruptly realize it was someone else? I don’t normally like the shocker type ending,
but given my previously mentioned propensities, this one worked out in my
favor.
Classifieds
Throughout
the book are little vignettes, classifieds excerpts or other miscellany from life
on Gateway. Some of the excerpts worked
better than others. I’m not sure if it
was just my printing but they seemed to be placed nearly at random and practically
every other instance interrupted a thought/sentence and, even if it was
interesting, the effect was to pull me right out of the story almost every
time. Of the different types of excerpts,
I most enjoyed the classifieds and the mission reports. Most others were not quite mildly interesting
and there were quite a few aimed at simply reiterating how little we know about
the Heechee and seemed redundant.
 |
| Funny classified, but interrupting a sentence |
I didn’t
always understand why this method was chosen either. Sure it functions as kind of a unique
worldbuilding technique but interrupting the rest of the text didn’t make sense
and to be honest some of the mission reports just seemed like copouts in place
of having to work include some semi-relevant info into the story when it
otherwise would not fit. The classroom exchanges could have easily been
shortened and worked into their own chapter and would have been much easier to
read and probably more interesting to boot.
But then, Pohl won not only the fan choice (Hugo) but also the writers’
choice (Nebula) awards, and according to the back cover copy Pohl called this the
best thing he’d ever written, which probably illustrates the fact that I’m just
making this up as I go along and my literary judgment is worth slightly less
than squat.
Recommendation
I had a
little trouble identifying with Rob as I read Gateway, but now that I’ve
written this review, I’m starting to see him as an ingenious character as
devised by Pohl. He’s just so blah that
it makes the ending all that much more shocking. This was an easy, fast-paced read (not for
the action, it just read that way) and I while it incorporated a lot of my
favorite SF elements, I wouldn’t expect this to be one of my favorites. It did make me want to seek out more of Pohl’s
work. I couldn’t say how accurate they
were but if you enjoy the tension and drama of a juicy therapy session, you’ve
got to read this!
HEP SCORE
Universe 3/5
Social/Political
Climate 5/5
Dialogue 4/5
Scientific
Wonders 4/5
Characters
4/5
Overall
20/25
Another roll of the die…
This
week’s book is Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre. I’ll be listening in to this very
pornographic sounding title via audiobook this week because it was available
and I haven’t done a Hugo winner aurally yet!
Next
week’s book is Ringworld by Larry Niven. I was first told about this book by my GIS
instructor in college. He was super
nerdy about how much he liked this book and made references to it quite a lot.
