Dane Metchnikov discovers what seems to be the secret to which ship has the best success rate for prospecting space loot. All of this is shadowed by the nostalgic trace of late 70’s doobies and easy love. Highlights: they eat in a commissary and they roll around in their sleeping hammocks. Robbie hangs around Klara, whose name, because of typos, is often misspelled as Kiara - quite confusing at first. But I won’t pick much because the whole book is like driving the Indy 500 with no tires, it’s a complete screaming failure but it’s sort of fun to watch. And there are fewer space ships ready to go than it seems there should be given the number that didn’t return, the ones that were ruined, and given the number of people and flights hinted at in the writing. Gateway seems much larger than its stated dimensions. Next up are pages of delay as Robbie undertakes relations with the opposite sex while fretting about going on another mission. The payoff is 90 days of body reek and interpersonal friction. Missing, however, is what I think Pohl is after, the gut-wrenching terror of playing the odds, where one bets one’s life on the possibility of wealth, that in turn seems to outweigh a desire to “go where no man has gone before.” The ship does an out and back to a waste of time gaseous planet. The unlucky ones…zip, zap, kaput, fried in the ship or never to return.Īfter an interminably long set up, Robbie finally goes on a mission.

Inside are hundreds of people and nearly a thousand smallish spacecraft, each with preprogrammed courses to take prospectors anywhere, - who knows where? The lucky prospectors reach planets and retrieve artifacts, a good find brings millions of dollars and a full Medical that can allow a person to live an extra fifty years. Today it’s the interstellar hangoug where hippies meet hyperspace. Gateway is a pearl-like 10 kilometer long space port with about 800 kilometers of tunnels once populated by a mysterious race called the Heechee.

There’s money enough for him to get off this sphere of despair with of a one way ticket to Gateway. This is good because as we discover, the universe is a capitalist issue. Televisions run morale-building commercials. Robbie works as a miner for shale oil slime that is the main food of humans. The Earth is a scarred and barren dystopia. First let’s take the Dickensian approach. The book is RB’s accounting for the need of therapy where we learn his dirtly space secret, but that’s for later. Robinette Broadhead is a rich ex-astrogating prospector who spends his time and money interacting with his AI Freudian analyst he’s nicknamed Sigfrid von Shrink. Gateway, by Frederik Pohl, fair use for review.

Gateway sci fi novel