Gateway

I like social commentary and messy characters, and this book is a clever science-fiction book that provides both in a package where I found myself rooting for the little guy. It is about a world where great poverty and suffering are rampant to the point where the poor participate in a lottery that can make them utterly rich. All they have to do is work on a mysterious alien space station.

The downside is that even air and water come at a cost, and they are very likely to die. It’s quite a setup for the story’s main character, Robinette.… show more.

I seem to be drawn to troubled characters—hence this list—and Robinette (Bob) Broadband is surely troubled.

We see his struggle from the book’s beginning, in which a virtual psychoanalyst, Sigfrid, attempts to get him to face and discuss his emotions. Sigfrid is itself an intriguing and, while it claims not to be sentient, still a sympathetic character.

Key aspects of the SF worldbuilding are also doled out carefully throughout the book, and then in the three books that follow. The scope of this imagined future and the importance of the stakes are revealed as the series continues.

First published in 1976, Gateway was reissued by Gollancz under the ‘SF Masterworks’ banner in 2003, and is another book I’ve read several times. Notices from the ‘Gateway’ space station, log entries, transcripts from interviews, and a first-person narrator all weave together the story of a journey from ‘Gateway’ to a black hole – and the journey of the narrator to understanding what happened there and why. Though it’s the first of Pohl’s “Heechee” series, Gateway, which won the Hugo, the Nebula, and the John W Campbell awards, is complete in itself and can be read and enjoyed as… show more.

Published in 1977, this is one of the first science fiction novels I fell head-over-heels in love with when I started exploring the genre. I'm surprised at how well the novel stands up today. Gateway is a space station abandoned long ago by a technologically superior race of aliens called the Heechee, who leave behind their galaxy-hopping spaceships for us to marvel over. As it turns out, we learn just enough about these ships to make us dangerous. Pohl's story is about luck (good and bad), the divide between the rich and the poor, and the fragility of the human… show more.