Novel: Gateway

Overview
Gateway is a tense, character-driven science fiction novel about luck, guilt, and the human drive for fortune. Set in a future of crushing overpopulation and grinding poverty, humanity benefits from a single extraordinary legacy: a small asteroid turned spaceport filled with abandoned, fully automated alien spacecraft left by an enigmatic race called the Heechee. The story follows Robinette Broadhead, a man who leaves an aching past behind to take his chances piloting those inscrutable ships in the hope of striking it rich.
The novel alternates between Broadhead's present-day therapy sessions and his recollections of the dangerous, often fatal runs on alien vessels. That structure peels back layers of trauma and moral ambiguity while building a suspenseful, foreboding portrait of contact with technology far beyond human understanding.

Plot and Structure
Robinette Broadhead arrives at Gateway as a prospective prospector, one of many desperate people who gamble on the Heechee ships' preset, unknown destinations. Each ship can be activated by a human pilot but cannot be steered, its destinations are fixed by the ancient Heechee, and crews frequently never return. Broadhead survives several missions and returns with wealth, but the victories are shadowed by losses and the constant knowledge that each run might be his last.
Intercut with the action are sessions with a sophisticated, quasi-therapeutic computer and recordings of Broadhead's confessions and nightmares. These therapy sequences reveal a complex inner life: the exhilaration of discovery and profit, the rawness of survivor's guilt, and the slow unspooling of a terrible suspicion that he may have caused or failed to prevent the deaths of others. The novel keeps readers uncertain about what truly happened on certain voyages, mirroring Broadhead's own uncertainty and the unsettling unknowability of the Heechee artifacts.

Themes and Tone
Gateway explores themes of chance versus agency, the ethical cost of survival under extreme scarcity, and the psychological price of frontier capitalism. The Heechee ships function as a literal and metaphorical lottery: they offer hope and transformation, but at a maddening cost. Pohl uses Broadhead's internal conflicts to examine how wealth acquired through risk can intensify isolation rather than resolve it, and how technology that surpasses comprehension can erode trust in oneself and others.
The tone balances hard-edged suspense, dark humor, and introspective melancholy. Scientific wonder mixes uneasily with paranoia; the alien remains more of an absence, implied intelligence and abandoned technology, than a presence, which heightens the novel's mood of awe tinged with dread.

Legacy and Impact
Gateway is both a gripping psychological study and a classic example of character-focused science fiction. Its narrative innovations, particularly the use of psychoanalytic-style recordings to reveal backstory and unreliable memory, give the book emotional depth uncommon in many adventure-driven works of its era. The novel's blend of social critique, human drama, and speculative mystery earned broad acclaim and influenced later treatments of alien artifacts and human contact in science fiction.
Beyond its awards, Gateway endures because it keeps readers aligned with a single, fallible consciousness facing moral ambiguity and cosmic indifference. The Heechee themselves remain tantalizingly distant, ensuring the story's tensions and questions continue to resonate long after the last page.