Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Gateway (Heechee Saga)

Reviewed in the United States on March 20, 2018

I love Gateway. I've read this and the sequels several times, over the decades. But if you check out the reviews, you'll see a spectrum of taste, ranging from adulation to contempt. Here's a brief sample of the science fiction works that I like. If you like them too, then you'll probably enjoy Gateway (a lot).

Asimov's Foundation Series
95%+ of Heinlein's work (I think I've read them all)
Clarke (Fountains of Paradise, Rendezvous with Rama)
The Stainless Steel Rat, by Harry Harrison
Ray Bradbury (451 for example)
Charles Sheffield's Cold as Ice series
Aldous Huxley (BNW, Chrome Yellow, Ape and Essence)

I think that Gateway fits into this genre very well, but closer to the "far out" range, like Niven's Rig World. Still, he handles the fantastic very well and makes it believable, as in "Yeah, that could happen."

Now the bad news. The sequels are very good and they introduce interesting new situations and characters. But in my opinion (you may think otherwise) they are 4-star. This first book in the series is the best. To me, it's well worth reading the series but Gateway is a stand-alone masterpiece, like Stranger in a Strange Land, and Fahrenheit 451. If you like shootouts with ray-guns, this is not your book.

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Lionel S. Taylor

A Very Entertaining Read With One very Annoying Flaw

Reviewed in the United States on February 8, 2014

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Gateway is a very entertaining book that alternates between the main character's description of his life working as a "prospector" a group of people tasked with piloting alien ships that they are not sure how to control to potentially new technology and fabulous wealth or into a certain death. This storyline is alternated with on in which the author is going to counseling sessions to try to work out the problems of his last mission. The two stories intertwine in a way that revels the same story but from different perspectives. There also interspersed throughout the book little informative tidbits in the form of classified ads and interviews with other characters giving the reader a word illustration of what is going on in the larger world of Gateway. I thought there were an especially good idea. Overall I really liked this book and was more than willing to give it a 5 stars. But then I got to the last chapters.

I have often heard other authors say that they do not consider their books sci fi when they obviously are. And I have always wondered why that is. I would think that one would love to have their book classified as this because it has a guaranteed fan base. But after reading Gateway and a few others I am beginning to see why. I have read several of the Hugo and Nebula award winning books and one thing that has bothered me about they is that many of these books that have been judged to be the best of the genera for that year by both readers (Hugo) and writers (Nebula) are written at about the emotional level of a 16 year old boy from the 1960. To give an example, there are several chapters in the story where the main character has encounters with his main love interest and they have quirky relationship that really doesn't seem to get developed that much except for the fact that she keeps referring to horoscopes and he keeps smoking and making witty retorts between endless bouts of sex. In one chapter he confronts his girlfriend after finding out that she has slept with another man (that he also has romantic feeling for) they end up getting into a fight and he severely beats her actually picking her up off the ground to punch her and knock a tooth out. Later in the book they are reunited and she makes know reference to the vicious attack and professes that she still loves him! WTF!!!!! The character even mentions that he can see the gap in her smile when the aforementioned tooth was knocked out! To me this is the most implausible part of the entire story. 1.) It implies that she is to blame for what happened and she acknowledges that. 2.) It also suggests that he is just so irresistible that despite he viciously beat a women she will still come back to him and let bygones be bygones making some offhand comment about people with his sign being volatile. This would maybe have made sense to me when I was 14 if I had read it but I am not and neither was the author when he wrote it. And I think that here is why you have authors that write a variety of books not wanting the sci fi label applied to their work. Even the acknowledged best in the genre often has terrible character development and just is not written with a mature non-male audience in mind. I am beginning to get the impression that labeling a book as sci fi indicates that it is sci fi written in a immature pulpy manner as which I find really sad since many stories have some really good ideas that are just really poorly executed.

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Bruce

Somewhat tedious in it's length, but ......

Reviewed in the United States on October 4, 2023

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...the overall premises of the story keeps you hanging on to find out what happens next. Because you don't know what anybody will find. Or die in the process. The ending almost makes you mad, with the loss of people.

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Pedro

a portal to the very known

Reviewed in the United States on July 2, 2014

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Gateway departs from some original and interesting ideas and has a pervasive dark humor which makes it an entertaining read.
Nevertheless the book fails to deliver the grandiosity it hails. The action is limited, somehow claustrofobic and excessively based on very limited settings which manages to make a this relatively short book slightly boring. Arguably the author may have intentionally done this, but if that is the case, the intended contrasts between the grandeur of the challenge and the narrowness of human condition are not entirely successful.
Pohl's predilection for side comments on capitalist development intensifies the feeling of cultural narrowness rather than relativising the reader's perception of society, which seems to have been the original intention.
There is also a biased vision of humanity in all the characters - the author is so determined to explore the sloppy, flawed aspect of human nature, that he dismisses the clear possibility for hierarchical, nearly automated human action, which would be likely to occur under the circumstances described.
One cannot stop feeling that the ominous, mysterious presence of the portal could have been explored more effectively to reflect on mortality, meaning and life, which are the background themes.
All in all it's not a bad book, and for all that matters it's worth a read, but it seems to sit well below the potential of is foundational idea: a portal to the unknown.

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Linda, Redlands CA

Timely delivery of a quality product

Reviewed in the United States on July 29, 2022

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Paperback in excellent condition, although not perfect; book cover had a couple of dings. Timely delivery by seller.

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haroldsson

Great Book! Terrible edition!!!

Reviewed in the United States on July 9, 2014

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One of my favorite books ever but this long awaited ebook edition of the Master Frederik Pohl's wonderful book has so many transcription and editing (if there was any editing/review at all) mistakes that a reader not familiar with the story and context and dialogue would be tempted to throw it away. This is a clear example of what can go wrong with e-books when put in the hands of sloppy people who are only looking at the commissions they will earn.
Frederik Pohl had written this seminal book and it's follow up series that just had a new book last year published is a wild, exciting, terrifying and unpredictable story. It is the classic story of terrible poverty driving people to gamble with what little life they might have. It is a story of luck and happenstance over all other factors.
Clean up this book with a good reviewer reader and editor and publish it again. Send out a refund on this e-book edition and then send out the corrected book to every e-book buyer.

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Amaxon Customer

Humans as Trained Monkeys

Reviewed in the United States on May 22, 2013

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First of Heechee series. Expendable people puzzling out dangerous artifacts makes a great story; that one should later need psych sessions is the puzzle here.
Robinette explores love as a diversion from the dangerous journeys he is on. There are exchanges of dialogue between descriptive passages of the ships and artifacts discovered. Additionally, there are these sessions with a robot to deal with deep-seated guilt.
It pulled me into his struggle to understand himself and the Heechee civilization.

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Paul Charran

A classic space exploration story.

Reviewed in the United States on September 14, 2015

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This is a classic story of space exploration. It doesn't apologize or pull any punches when describing how things can go wrong in the unknown. I especially liked the description of the training given to the potential explorers. Or the fact that not all the explorers were gung-ho hero types. I could have been one of these characters. All-in-all a fascinating read.

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Robert M.

Dreary novel set in a bleak future

Reviewed in the United States on September 13, 2014

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This book has one thing going for it, and that is that it is original. The basic premise of "Gateway" as an abandoned alien outpost with a bunch of alien FTL ships that still sort of work is an intriguing setup. This is "hard sci-fi" but the focus is clearly on the human psyche, emotions, and relationships. I'm not opposed to that - I'd rather have a good story with well-developed, complex characters rather than space battles and exploding spaceships and laser beams. But this particular book didn't work for me.

Quite simply, I found this book terminally dull and dreary. There is some humor sprinkled throughout, most of it quite dark. But otherwise - our protagonist is a self-absorbed drifter. He never takes much initiative, until the last possible minute, and usually out of fear or desperation. I found very little to identify with or like about him.

The future world imagined here is also quite bleak. We don't learn a whole lot about the world outside of Gateway, but it sounds like the Earth is overpopulated with a dreary subsistence existence for the untold billions, and a minority of rich people living in luxury. Gateway itself is not much better - a bunch of desperate prospectors, mostly dropouts from society, essentially playing Russian roulette for a chance at getting rich.

The book alternates between the present, with the narrator (Rob) "on the couch" with a computer psychotherapist, and the past, describing Rob's time at Gateway. The two storylines converge toward the end of the book, which is the only part I found interesting (but depressing!) For the first 80% or so, they are quite disconnected, except for occasional mention of characters or events from the "past" storyline coming up in the "present" therapy sessions, and of course the "present" foreshadowing that Rob somehow strikes it rich, and that something bad happens. Otherwise the therapy sessions are mostly Rob whining about the computer therapist, which speaks mostly in clichés. The "past" storyline at Gateway is a little more engaging, but again it is such a bleak setting. There is not much action, so instead we have lots of drifting, dissipation, and navel-gazing while waiting for something to happen.

So overall, this book has an interesting concept, and I can understand why it is considered a classic, but I didn't enjoy reading it. It gave me the same feeling as I had years ago in high school when they made us read John Updike's "Rabbit Run". As literature I guess it's good because it says something about the human condition, but there's nothing uplifting or enjoyable about reading it. Definitely not something to read if you're just looking for a few hours of escapist fantasy.

One other note: The Kindle edition has numerous typos and formatting mistakes. There are sections where entire sentences appear to get chopped up and duplicated at random, making entire pages unintelligible. There are sections where the "main text" gets run into the "notices" and "classified ads". There are words and names that clearly got spelled wrong. Much more intrusive and pervasive than the occasional typos that pop up in Kindle editions.

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michael a. Davis

Hugo Award winner

Reviewed in the United States on February 3, 2022

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Great book reread it in the last week. For those who don’t know Gateway is a relic of the Heechee an ancient alien race that has vanished. They have left ships behind that no one knows where they go. It is either death nothing or jackpot. Robinette Broadhead is a player and he eventually hits the Jackpot. But he is tormented by those who have been left behind. And he seeks psychiatric help a computer program named Ziggy

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