Throwback Thursday: Pressing Your Luck in Frederik Pohl’s Gateway

If there’s one thing that really underscores their genius, it’s the central premise: The mystery of the Heechee, the shadowy (and, initially, apparently extinct) alien race that left our universe littered with their strange technology, including the titular Gateway station, built into an asteroid and filled to the brim with incomprehensible spaceships. Humans have had limited success figuring out Heechee technology, and no one understands how the ships work—but they’ve figured out that if you press certain buttons, the ships will go…somewhere. Sometimes that means you and your crew return laden with yet more Heechee technology that can be adapted and raided, making you rich. Sometimes that means your ship stops in the heart of a supernova and you’re instantly killed. Sometimes that means you haven’t enough food for the trip’s length, and you starve to death trapped on an alien craft, with no way home.
I mean, seriously: What more do you need to know about these books? If that premise doesn’t have you sprinting for the bookstore or your approved digital reading device, you are dead inside.

And Gateway station is but our entry point into Pohl’s universe. There’s so much more in these books, from commentary on money, healthcare, and corporate ethics, to thrilling heroics, as the main characters leap into sketchy alien spaceships in desperate attempts to escape crushing poverty and have what the kids call adventures. It’s thrilling stuff, but also doesn’t overlook the consequences of risk and loss: In the first novel, two ships arrive at the edge of a black hole and become trapped; a plan for escape is devised and goes sideways, and only one person returns. He spends the rest of his life racked with survivor’s guilt, reduced to visiting an AI therapist, the only entity he can find to talk to him. Though the over-arching mystery of the Heechee (who they were, why they’re all gone, and why their technology is littered across the galaxy like forgotten toys) drives the plots, these are character-based novels through and through.
Yet it’s the idea of those mystery trips that has stayed with me for nearly thirty years since I first read Gateway. For a long time I entertained myself by writing mental fan fiction about doomed expeditions, inventing creative ways for desperate people to suffer really awesomely bad luck in their choice of Heechee spaceship. I imagined ships that exploded the moment your turned them on, ships that brought you to formerly settled planets that now lacked water or air, ships that took you to planet-sized automated prisons where you would be held forever by robotic jailers. I basically wrote a brain anthology of horrific Gateway-inspired stories, and I still think it needs to be published as quickly as possible. It would be awesome.

Pohl wrote several novels and stories that expand the Heechee mythology, answer some questions, and further explore the themes and characters of the universe. They are all highly entertaining, but it’s the first book that stays with me, the nightmarish idea of being so desperate you’d get into an alien ship you didn’t understand or have any real control over, and pray you got something great…instead of death, horror, or something even worse—something so alien you wouldn’t even comprehend it as horror or death. That’s why these books stick with me.