Frederick Pohl. (last name rhymes with 'doll' [I think])
Born 1919, he was in the great depression! Good friends with nonentities such as Isaac Asimov, Cyril M Kornbluth, Lester del Rey - you know the usual bunch. Actually these buddy-buddy Spec Fiction authors are beginning to annoy me. Aren't there any famous spec fiction authors who aren't part of the gang?
Anyway, Fred was a Communist and served in the US Army. Take that, McCarthy! He began the futurians fan club in 1936, edited, Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories. He was an agent representing sci fi authors from 1937 to the early 1950s. He was an acquisitions editor and did copy editing for Bantam Books, published as Frederick Pohl Selections. There really aren't too many people who get a series of books named after them.
How funny is this - he did work for Encyclopaedia Britannica on Emperor Tiberius and guess where he currently resides? Palatine (in Chicago). Coincidence? I don't think so.
He has also won nearly every sci fi prize there is to win.
The man is still alive. Nice work.
Gateway was written in 1977 and won a Hugo.
I am dying to get into the rest of this series.
It is the FUTURE. Earthlings have scoured the galaxy, looking for signs of intelligent life other than themselves. Eventually, they find it. Long dormant artefacts of what we decide to call the 'Hee Chee' civilisation. This includes spaceships that no one really knows how to use that have been left behind at 'Gateway'. If you can work hard enough to scrounge up enough money to get to Gateway, you have the chance to get into one of these ships and let it zoom you and a couple of others off to parts unknown. Will you find death? Hee Chee artefacts? A Hee Chee? If you find artefacts, you are paid enough money by the 'company' to set yourself up for the rest of your life. This doesn't happy to many though. More often than not the spacecraft are gone too long and the crew starve, the ship simply doesn't return, or you don't find a thing. More often you find death. No one has ever found a Hee Chee.
Pohl intersperses his text with adverts from the noticeboards at Gateway. They advertise everything, from massages to mission reports. They really add to the spacestation atmosphere, the feeling that you're definitely not at home anymore, that the company runs the place.
The protagonist has clearly hit it big at some point. But he is far from satisfied with life. We find out everything through his flashbacks while he is in psychology sessions with a company robot-psychologist. I quite like this method for this book. The Hee Chee idea is fascinating and pulls you right in. Will they find a Hee Chee? It seems to me to be the perfect name. Humanity arrogantly assigns a dead race this moniker, confident in its own longevity and superiority despite not having a clue as to how the Hee Chee spaceships operate.
And the trips out in the ships is gripping. It's only once you're out there and you watch the light pattern on the console that you know whether or not you have a chance of living. Certain ships hold a certain number of occupants, five being the maximum. There is only enough room for a limited amount of food. Once the lights change colour, you know you're nearly at your destination and thus halfway. If you've already used up more than half your food, then you're screwed. So for everyone, it's a tense trip out until the lights begin to change. Once they do and you know you'll survive, there's the excitement of where your destination might be. Will there be riches at the end? Will there be a supernova where there was once a Hee Chee destination and thus certain death? Will there be a single surviving Hee Chee to tell you where the hell the navigation controls are?
So each time Robin, (our Hero) goes out, or describes another trip, it's a nerve-wracking experience. It doesn't help that he is petrified of actually going out. The high fatality rate can deter many people and he meets up with Klara who feels exactly the same way. Even though I knew he hits it big at some stage, I still felt unsure of success when he does finally go out.
But it's the how of Robin's big financial gain that gets ya at the end...
I was excited when I realised this was the first of the Hee Chee series. I will be reading the rest soon.
9/10 on the spec fiction scale.
over and out.
