Wealth ... or death. Those were the choices Gateway offered. Humans had discovered this artificial spaceport, full of working interstellar ships left behind by the mysterious, vanished Heechee.
Their destinations are preprogrammed. They are easy to operate, but impossible to control. Some came back with discoveries which made their intrepid pilots rich; others returned with their remains barely identifiable. It was the ultimate game of Russian roulette, but in this resource-starved future there was no shortage of desperate volunteers.
'All the elements for a great read: humour, drama, tragedy, great one-liners, a marvellously quirky central character and a great supporting character in the robotic psychologist' Garry Kilworth
'Combines two narratives - one outer space, one inner space - both fascinating...makes for compulsive reading' Chicago Daily News
Author
About Frederik Pohl
Frederik Pohl was born in 1919. he was a member of the new York SF group, The Futurians, and much of his early work was written with other members (such as C.M. Kornbluth) under pseudonyms. Many of these stories were published in Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories while Pohl was editing both magazines from 1940-1943. After World War Two he became a literary agent, representing most of the major names in SF at the time. He started publishing under his own name in 1953, when he wrote The Space Merchants with Kornbluth. Pohl continued to publish under a variety of names while he was working at Galaxy Science Fiction and If. He was editor of both magazines from 1961 to 1969, and during this period, If won three Hugos for Best Magazine (1966-1968). Pohl’s many short stories were collected and published in a series of books starting with Alternating Currents (1956). He continued to work with Kornbluth; novels from this period include Search the Sky (1954). Gladiator-at-Law (1955) and Wolfbane (1959). Pohl took up full time writing in mid 1969. his novel Man Plus (1976) won the Nebula award and the following year Gateway won the Hugo, the Nebula and the John W. Campbell Award. From 1974 to ’76, Pohl was president of the Science Fiction Writers of America. One of the most cosmopolitan and widely-travelled of SF writers, he was president of World SF from 1980 to ’82.
