Gateway (1977)

by Frederik Pohl

It must be understood that Gateway depicts and is narrated by a severely mentally unwell man. Keep this in mind and you have a clever and engaging story set among the stars that is really about people and the different ways we break.

The Gateway is an artifact left by a long-gone race of aliens orbiting somewhere in the inner solar system perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic. On it are countless ships that humans know very little about beyond how to press the “go” button.

Our main character Robinette “Bob” Broadhead is one of those who are lucky or sorry enough to be a prospector on these ships and to chart out to unknown places to face unknown dangers and reap unknown rewards. Gateway’s pervasive and self-aware absurdity should be familiar to anybody who’s read anything by Kurt Vonnegut.

The story alternates between chapters out in space and down on Earth in a psychiatrist’s office. Interspersed throughout are what I thought of as illustrations: clippings from newspapers and instruction manuals, snippets from lectures and drinking songs that do a fantastic job of adding color and filling in the blanks left by our sloppy and unreliable narrator. In the Gateway classifieds section:

HOW DO you know you’re not a Unitarian? Gateway fellowship now forming. 87-539.

BILITIS WANTED for Sappho and Lesbia, joint trips till we make it, then happily ever after in Northern Ireland. Permanent trimarriage only. 87-033 or 87-034.

STORE YOUR effects. Save rent, avoid Corporation seizure while out. Fee includes disposal instructions if nonreturn. 88-125.

If most prospectors have some screws loose when they ship out, one, two, five prospecting trips don’t help the situation. Our protagonist is certainly worse for wear afterwards and we spend half of the book watching him dodge the elephant in the room in his therapist’s office. The trope of the shrink has become all too common in recent decades but I have to imagine it was fresh when this novel landed in 1977, years before Hannibal Lecter was inked into being and decades before Tony Soprano graced the TV screen.

Let’s get this straight: therapy or not, Bob is supremely unlikable. A generous take would be to say that he’s irritating in his actions and self-centered in his narration. His recount of his time as a prospector is just off-kilter enough to make you wonder if it’s intentional or not and in this way, it’s a convincing depiction of a high-functioning but deeply broken man. Thankfully the novel is not quite long enough for this to get tiresome.

Pohl manages to introduce many interesting concepts while keeping the tech grounded in what most would consider to be scientific reality. Gateway is not “hard” sci-fi by any means but it leans in that direction rather than a more Star-Trek-like one. Without divulging too much detail, the finale uses a cosmic phenomenon to wrap up the main emotional rollercoaster in what I would consider to be one of the best uses of the make-believe in sci-fi as a literary device to amplify and augment a human story.

The parts of this book that have aged are not the important ones. Gateway is a classic deserving of its Hugo and of a read by every science fiction fan and any normal person not afraid to see past some spaceships and dead aliens and find a brilliant novel.