Frederick Pohl's Gateway is a weirder book than I was expecting. I may change my mind after I think some more about what it was saying and what it was lampooning, so let's call this review a draft (technically a third draft).
But before I get into it, a quick news item! I will be discussing Gateway and other classic 20th century science fiction at Chattacon 48 (Jan. 13-15, 2023) here in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where I will be a panelist! Maybe I will see you there to carry on the discussion in person!
Okay, back to the novel. The style is engaging for the most part (it occasionally drags, but that's because the main character is dragging his feet). I love the little snippets of information plopped into the middle of the narrative, including classified ads, computer programs, lectures, etc. I was wondering if Kim Stanley Robinson was inspired by this in his novel 2312, but in both cases it's a fun way to do world building without infodumping immersed into the narrative.
The main character, Bob, wins a lottery to leave his brutal life in a food mine on Earth serving an overpopulated planet. He goes to Gateway, which is a cosmic gateway filled with cool alien technology from long lost aliens who probably haven't visited for 500,000 years. Cool! That aspect of the novel, something of a cousin of the Big Dumb Object trope, is really cool, but you don't get a lot of answers. Nor do you get much Arthur C. Clarke exploration of the mystery of it all.
Instead you get something more like a Heinlein-style character-based explorations of the economics of it all, only I'm not so sure Pohl shared Heinlein's rosy view of pure libertarianism (if that was Heinlein's view: who knows with that guy?). While Bob is happy to be on Gateway, he's still hustling and grinding his way to a meager lifestyle in space on the slim hopes of hitting it big as a prospector on the dangerous human missions on the alien ships.
Why must they have humans on board instead of robots? I can't remember if anyone bothered to ask, but maybe Pohl's point is about how rampant capitalism leaves most of us in a miserable rat race chasing a mostly unobtainable ideal of a small elite class while we grind away for basic necessities.
There's a lot of talk about how expensive and unobtainable even basic medical care is for most of humanity, maybe the most prescient aspect of the book. It's also not surprising if you consider Pohl's excellent satire of advertising and consumer culture: The Space Merchants, co-authored with C. M. Kornbluth. A deeper critique perhaps: all this too-quotidian focus on economic exploitation of the alien artifacts totally robs everyone in the book of the sense of wonder of technology left by an alien species half a million years ago!
Another thing: every other chapter or so is a flash forward to Bob as a rich man, presumably after his big find, talking to a computer psychoanalyst. I have about as much faith in psychoanalysis as Bob has in his girlfriend's astrology, but those chapters were strangely engaging and integral to the structure of the novel (including a Big Reveal I won't spoil here).
So there's some cool stuff.
But you get the weird thing where life in the future in space is sort of like it was in the US in the 1970's (lots of smoking inside spaceships, free love in a very 60's/70's sense, etc.), although I do have to commend Pohl for at least sort of begrudgingly accepting the fact that women are human beings who might have jobs and inner lives and that gay, lesbian, and bi people exist (compare him to something contemporaneous like Joe Haldeman's The Long War or Frank Herbert's later Dune books).
There is one scene where Bob brutally beats a loved one. I didn't understand or care for that at all, nor did I understand why he still had a job or a relationship after that. Honestly it just about soured me on the whole book, but then again, Bob is a miserable, unlikable piece of shit.
Still, I like to at least sort of want to cheer for anti-heroes, and it became harder for me to care whether Bob made his big claim as the novel went on (I had a similar reaction to a very different 1970's novel with a similarly assholish protagonist: Stephen R. Donaldson's Lord Foul's Bane).
So I think a lot of my evaluation of Gateway depends on what's supposed to be serious and what's supposed to be satire. And it's not always clear. But maybe that's what makes it an interesting novel despite its drawbacks.
PS: Please come discuss this book and other topics with me in person at Chattacon this weekend!
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