Back to the Hugos: Gateway by Frederik Pohl

To get a sense of the appeal of Frederik Pohl's 1977 Hugo winner, Gateway, have a look at what the author is up to at the moment. The Way The Future Blogs is ostensibly an online memoir. Ostensibly. It does contain plenty of intriguing notes from Pohl's career as a science fiction editor and touching tributes to the writers he knew, but like most of the best blogs, The Way The Future Blogs becomes truly interesting when it veers away from its purported subject to whatever else appeals to its author's questing and curious intelligence.

The attractions range from short sharp pieces on what the demise of the clothes peg can tell us about US civilisation, to surprising factoids, to reminiscences about the Reverend Moon and arcology. Look also at the numerous pieces on contemporary politics and soak up Pohl's delight at the energy of the Occupy movement and his horror at the evils of the US Republican party. Pohl has still got the rage – a fact which seems all the more impressive considering he's 92. Small surprise then, that Gateway, written when he was a positively spritely 60-something bursts with energy, anger, intelligence and fierce, warm humanity.

Plenty of these qualities are embodied in the narrator who glories in the absurd SF name of Robinette Broadhead ("in spite of which I am male", he tells us early on). Robinette would be easy to describe as one of life's natural losers, except for the fact that he keeps on striking lucky. Or at least, seems to. He grows up in a community that earns a dangerous "stinking" living extracting oil from shale in order to produce food. (Pohl's descriptions of the environmental desecrations of this technique eerily presage contemporary problems.) The only way out of this short life (short because working in the mines doesn't generate enough money for medical insurance) is to die or win the lottery. Robinette does – and spends the money on making the very expensive trip to Gateway.

Gateway is the epicentre of an inter-galactic gold rush, a kind of hollowed-out meteor that has been discovered to contain spacecraft left over from the "Heechee", an ancient alien civilisation. Humans don't know much about the controls of the craft beyond how to turn them on – but that's enough to send them whizzing off to other galaxies, where, if they're lucky, they'll find enough scientific booty to garner them untold riches. And if they aren't … Well, no one quite knows what happens to those that aren't lucky, as they don't tend to come back. Or they do come back splattered all over the controls of their spaceships … Do they arrive in the wrong place at the wrong time and get caught up, say, in the middle of a super nova? Do the strange physics of space-time mean that – strictly speaking – some of them are still out there?

There's an intriguing uncertainty to the whole proceeding, as Robinette describes it – alongside an almost numinous sense of the unknown and the vast mystery of space. The ideas are backed up by excellent writing. There's nothing too fancy. But it gets you from A to Englightenment in an effective and entertaining way, and it's made all the more compelling by Pohl's success at rendering life on a human scale alongside that vast multiverse. He's adept at making esoteric ideas psychologically comprehensible and physically grounded. The incomprehensible gamble of taking off into those unknown frontiers finds a scaled-down parallel in an obsession with casinos among the people on Gateway, while a good sense of reality is added by excellent descriptions of tangible details like the unpleasant smell of the recycled air on Gateway and the cramped difficulties of life on the small Heechee ships.

Most satisfying of all is the palpable effect the speculative ideas in the book have on poor Robinette. Thanks to a strange paradox of space-time encountered during a mission on a Heechee ship (to say more would spoil a fine build-up of dramatic tension) Robinette is left a rich man, but also in mourning and feeling overwhelmingly guilty. We feel his pain throughout the book, since it's all told in flashback, alongside a (less effective, but at least quite amusing) parallel narrative in which Robinette works through his problems with a robot psychologist. The book burns with, as Robinette describes it, "an intensity of pain and guilt and misery" and it's felt all the more strongly because although Robinette is always endearing, and frequently charmingly funny, he's also capable of making bad and morally dubious decisions. Because, in short, he's an unusually complicated and fascinating character, just like the author of The Way The Future Blogs appears to be. The net result is one of the best Hugo winners I have read.

Next time: Dreamsnake by Vonda N McIntyre