Back in
2013 I felt that I should try again to read some stories by
Frederik Pohl. I now feel some guilt arising from the fact that I delayed that assignment for five years. Why the delay? On many occasions I've been browsing in book stores, trying my best to feel inspired by a story that Pohl had published, but the result was always the same:
NO $ALE.
Now that we are 100 years into the
Pohl Era, I've recently tried to read several short stories by Pohl:
"The Mapmakers"
read at archive.org
"The Tunnel Under the World"
read at gutenberg.org
"My Lady Greensleeves"
read at gutenberg.org
I could not actually read the entirety of any of those stories... I ended up skimming my way to the end.
And now, here in 2019, the same thing happened when I sat down to read
Gateway. After 50 years of trying, it may be time to conclude that I simply can't read an entire Pohl novel.
The version of
Gateway that I [tried to] read was the original version published in
Galaxy magazine in late 1976 and early
1977.
I thought that
Gateway might be a good Pohl novel for me to read because I've been intrigued/obsessed by the idea of
ancient aliens ever since the early 1970s.
However, I can't stop myself from feeling the need to label
Gateway as
anti-science fiction. Imagine finding an abandoned super-advanced faster-than-light spacecraft of alien design and then giving a poorly-educated shale miner a crash course in how to fly, hand him the keys and say, "Go have a nice ride!" That's the basic plot of
Gateway. Sorry, but that's very hard for a science nerd like me to swallow. That's a story that I found impossible to pay $ for and read. With
Gateway now available to me as
a free download I was able to force myself to try to read it.
Guilt Trip
I'm not convinced that
Gateway was really intended by Pohl to be a science fiction story; it seems more like a device for a looong drawn-out exploration of guilt. I grew up in a time (the 1960s) when I could be enthralled by the fact that enough had been learned through scientific investigation of the world so that space travel to the Moon was now possible, computers were becoming cheaper and more powerful and the molecular basis of life was understood. I was in a generation of young nerds who never had to even register for the draft.
Contrast my world with that of Pohl, a man who actually served in the military and was sent to Europe during World War II. I think there were people of Pohl's generation who could not avoid experiencing their lives as a kind of life-or-death lottery. Some of the best and brightest of their generation died seemingly random deaths in the war or were crippled by polio or were innocent children killed by bomb blasts coldly calculated and inflicted in order to end the war. How much personal guilt did Pohl feel and was it therapeutic for him to write
Gateway as an expression of his own feelings of guilt?
Kill two birds with one stone
Yes, Pohl wrote
Gateway so as to include science fiction elements, but they strike me as little more than guilt-centric plot elements. The space aliens in
Gateway (the Heechee) can even be viewed as an expression of "science fiction guilt". The Heechee Saga apparently began with "
The Merchants of Venus". One of
the great downfalls of 20th century adventure fiction was all of the
imagination wasted on wishful-thinking stories about Mars and Venus as
places where aliens or humans might live. However, I like the idea that
humans might actually try to go to the surface of Venus if there was
evidence that "ancient aliens" had been there long ago and left behind advanced
technological marvels. This is the beginning of the Heechee saga, with Heechee-created tunnels having been found on Venus.
Here is something I wrote back
in 2010: "Parts of Stanisław Lem's
Solaris and
Shikasta are not traditional narrative. I do not believe that science fiction novels have to conform to traditional formats." In
Gateway, every other chapter is a literal guilt trip, a man struggling to deal with his guilt, his survivor's remorse. Not a traditional format for a science fiction story. When I was in my
personal golden age of discovering science fiction, I read
Solaris and
Shikasta and that was really enough guilt tripping to last me a lifetime. I read and write science fiction stories for entertainment and so for 40 years I resisted taking a slog through Pohl's
Gateway guilt trip.
Also, I'm not a fan of
horror stories.
Gateway has a huge horror element (
here called "dread") that I found boring, repetitive, unimaginative, gimmicky and designed to appeal to a mass market: it reminds me of the silly
"professional" wrestling TV shows that have inexplicably existed during my entire lifetime.
 |
| an abandoned Heechee spaceship |
The story in
Gateway is told by Robinette Broadhead. He's proud to be a coal shale
miner's daughter and for half of the pages of
Gateway he's singing to his shrink ("Sigfrid") about his sexual exploits: trying to distract both he and the shrink from the looming problem of Robinette's guilt.
I do want to pass along one big THANK YOU to Fred Pohl. When we meet Robinette
she he is a trembling cauldron of suppressed memories. Mercifully, Pohl skips over the past 16 years of Robinette's life. Thankfully even Pohl could not write out 16 years of imaginary psychoanalysis sessions. For those of you who thrive on psychoanalytic discussions of topics like rectal thermometers, Pohl made sure to include all of those topics in
Gateway.
Robinette Bonehead is an "every-man", the pop culture myth of a man who wins the lottery -twice. Rags to riches. Go ahead and imagine
Johnny Cash singing about a boy named Robinette who has such a tough life that he beats up his girlfriend (Klara). Sorry, but I don't want to read science fiction stories about people who punch out their girlfriend. I guess Pohl was just trying to build up Bob's guilt account, but I don't look to science fiction stories for these kinds of things. Just not my cup of tea. Pohl was an expert at finding things to write about so as to guarantee that I would stop reading and start skimming towards the end of the story. In any case, I suppose I'm not supposed to worry about Klara. In
Gateway she gets beaten up and sucked into a black hole and grieved over by Bob for decades, but eventually she gets "rescued" and lives on as a character in other Heechee saga novels.
The Gambling Way
 |
| alien prospecting |
I feel that that
Gateway should have been called "Gamblers Way". Bob (Robinette) becomes rich by surviving a dangerous mission in outer-space. Within the story, the gamblers all call their activity "prospecting". This form of gambling involves going for a ride in an alien spaceship to a preset destination which more than likely will kill you. With luck on their side, a few prospectors like Robinette hit it rich.
 |
| alien artifact |
Gateway grew into a multi-novel Heechee saga, but I have not read any of the other stories in the series. However, I've long known the basics of the plot. When I was a small boy growing up in the previous millennium, a drive through rural America revealed a seemingly endless array of old abandoned tractors and windmills. As a young boy, those artifacts were a great stimulus to my imagination: each of them had a story -a piece of someone's life- behind it. Lucky for gamblers like Bob in
Gateway, the Heechee artifacts that lie scattered around the galaxy are constructed from a marvelous blue metal that does not rust. After a couple hundred thousand years, you can jump into a Heechee spaceship, start it up and head for the stars. Strangely, the Heechee themselves are nowhere to be found.
The disappearing Heechee remind me of E. E. Smith's
Arisians who were locked in battle against the evil
Eddorians.
I'm a fan of making humans the "heroes" of Space Operas, but some care is needed to craft a believable story in which readers are asked to imagine the human species as a well-designed tool that can magically counter/understand the great powers a billions-of-years-old super-advanced force like the Eddorians or "
the Foe".
Does Pohl's Heechee saga achieve this goal? Sadly, I'll never know because I can't bring myself to slog through his stories.
 |
| The gods must be crazy. |
The god-like Heechee dropped a
Coke bottle spaceship on Robinette. The gods must be crazy gamblers.
Alien Artifacts
I enjoy science fiction stories that concern the discovery of alien artifacts. In 1951
Arthur Clarke published "
The Sentinal of Eternity" which included the idea of an ancient alien artifact. Clarke eventually developed that idea into the well-known movie, "
2001: A Space Odyssey". In 1956
Isaac Asimov published "
The Key", a story about the discovery of an alien artifact on the Moon (a kind of thought amplifier). In Asimov's story, there were also fragments of metal, apparently the remains of a crashed alien spaceship.
In 1960, "
Rogue Moon" was published, a story about a mysterious alien device on the Moon that kills the people who explore it. I don't mind stories that are built around the idea of alien beings who humans find to be incomprehensible. However, there are only so many such stories that I'm willing to slog through. There are an infinite number of inexplicable things we can all imagine, and they do not all deserve their own science fiction story. Part of my problem in trying to read
Gateway is that I've seen these
magic tricks plot elements before.
Artificial life
ELIZA was a "chatbot" created in the 1960s. When personal computers started being made in the 1970s the ELIZA software could be run in the home, exposing millions of people to a simple programmed system for simulated conversation with a computer. These days, we all have access to computer programs that we can talk to, but it was still something of a novelty (unless you were a science fiction fan) back when
Gateway was published.
 |
| Star Trek |
In the 1960s, Sci Fi nerds watched television shows such as the
Star Trek episode "Tomorrow is Yesterday" where fun was had with
talking computers.
Pohl ran with this idea in
Gateway and devoted half of the novel to conversations between Bob and his computerized shrink. I'm a huge fan of including artificial lifeforms in science fiction stories. Apparently, later in the Heechee saga, Bob himself becomes some sort of artificial lifeform allowing his mind to outlive his biological body.
 |
| Sigfrid provides Bob with a Klara simulation |
In
Part 3 of
Gateway there is a holodeck-like scene when Sigfrid shows images of Klara to Bob. This is part of Bob's therapy for forcing him to bring the pain of his "Guilt Trip" out into the open where he can deal with it and move on with his life. Bob must come to terms with his guilt over having survived a space travel mission during which Klara [apparently] died.
 |
| Heechee spaceship emerges from Black Hole? |
How did Klara die? What happened to the Heechee? There is only one answer: they went into a
Black Hole. Amazingly, the Heechee can come back out of a Black Hole. Many science fiction stories involve time travel, faster-than-light space travel and other plot elements that defy the known laws of physics, so why not imagine a future technology that allows the Heechee to go into Black Hole and then come back out again? This might be a "reasonable" Sci Fi plot element, but unfortunately I got my fill of this sort of plot element in
Star Trek V.
When Pohl wrote
Gateway, physicists were still waiting for good experimental evidence that would confirm the existence of Black Holes. I suppose we should congratulate Pohl for going ahead and making Black Holes a key element in his Heechee saga. In my case, when I need a plot device that allows me to hide aliens, I make use of the Hierion Domain. For those of us who worry about tiny details like having your fictional characters torn apart by powerful gravitational forces, Black Holes are not ideal hiding places.
Ecofi
In the 1960s there was much hand-wringing over
starvation and world
population growth. Both Pohl and
Asimov grew up as city boys who had no idea of where food comes from. For the fictional future Earth of
Gateway, Pohl's imaginary solution to feeding the growing human population of Earth was to make food from coal shale.
 |
| hive aliens |
Food from the hydrocarbons in fossil fuels? I suppose this is not significantly different than Asimov's idea of feeding the world by building gigantic
yeast factories, although
Gateway adds in the silly idea of desperately trying to pull every last molecule of hydrocarbon out of the fossil fuel deposits in Earth's crust. By the time when Pohl published
Gateway, scientists such as
Mikhail Budyko were warning about the effects of
rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. But, who knows, maybe advanced Heechee technology provides a solution to rising carbon dioxide levels. Maybe the mysterious
golden coils in the Heechee spaceships convert carbon dioxide back into oxygen.
 |
| monstarz |
Underground
If fantasy stories can have flying dragons then science fiction stories can have burrowing Heechee who search through the galaxy for carbon deposits to mine and convert into food. Through the years, I've also been subjected to the hive-dwelling Majat of "
Serpent’s Reach",
Jack Vance's
Star Kings who evolved in swampy burrows, and of course, there were the Morlocks.
In "
The Time Machine", the Morlocks had evolved in Earth's far future as a human variant that lives underground. As a biologist, I find it hard to suspend disbelief and go along with the fictional human evolution as depicted in
The Time Machine and the fictional carbon chemistry (or lack there of) and Heechee biology of
Gateway. Apparently the Heechee need microwave radiation to survive. This strikes me as being as silly as Niven's idea that the
Pak could not survive on Earth due to a shortage of thallium.
 |
| tripin' |
I love the idea that human origins might be traced to ancient alien visitors. As a tribute to
Niven, I have space aliens called the "
pek" in my
Exodemic Fictional Universe. However, I had to stop reading Niven's science fiction because of all the implausible biology. The straw that broke that camel's back was Niven's idea that you can
breed humans for luck. In the case of
Gateway, I'm curious if Pohl ever tried to explain why a biological organism might need microwaves. But not curious enough to read more of the Heechee saga.
Pyramid Power
Related Reading:
tribute to Pohl at tor.com
why aliens like microwaves.
Next:
Rylla's adventures in America
And now, here in 2019, the same thing happened when I sat down to read Gateway. After 50 years of trying, it may be time to conclude that I simply can't read an entire Pohl novel.
I do want to pass along one big THANK YOU to Fred Pohl. When we meet Robinette 
Robinette Bonehead is an "every-man", the pop culture myth of a man who wins the lottery -twice. Rags to riches. Go ahead and imagine Johnny Cash singing about a boy named Robinette who has such a tough life that he beats up his girlfriend (Klara). Sorry, but I don't want to read science fiction stories about people who punch out their girlfriend. I guess Pohl was just trying to build up Bob's guilt account, but I don't look to science fiction stories for these kinds of things. Just not my cup of tea. Pohl was an expert at finding things to write about so as to guarantee that I would stop reading and start skimming towards the end of the story. In any case, I suppose I'm not supposed to worry about Klara. In Gateway she gets beaten up and sucked into a black hole and grieved over by Bob for decades, but eventually she gets "rescued" and lives on as a character in other Heechee saga novels.
In 1960, "Rogue Moon" was published, a story about a mysterious alien device on the Moon that kills the people who explore it. I don't mind stories that are built around the idea of alien beings who humans find to be incomprehensible. However, there are only so many such stories that I'm willing to slog through. There are an infinite number of inexplicable things we can all imagine, and they do not all deserve their own science fiction story. Part of my problem in trying to read Gateway is that I've seen these 
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