The Gateway Trip

The Gateway Trip is a collection of science fiction "tales and vignettes", including a novella, [1] by the American writer Frederik Pohl. It was published in 1990 by Ballantine Books. It involves one of Pohl's recurring creations, the Heechee universe. The Heechee are a fictional alien race which developed advanced technologies, including interstellar space travel, but then disappeared.

Contents

The book includes anecdotes and "...meditations on planetary and stellar physics, evolution, sociology, and the future of the human race" that "fill in the background of his Heechee novels".[1] The story The Merchants of Venus is about Audee Walthers, an "airbody driver and tour operator", who scams Earth tourists who visit Venus. He needs a new liver, so he is seeking a rich client to profit from. He is pleased to meet the seemingly wee-off Boyce Cochenour. However, Walthers finds out that Cochenour also needs money.

Reception

Kirkus Reviews states that the book is "[m]ore history text than story", as the "...characters of the vignettes are barely seen shadows, a background for pure speculation."[1] Kirkus Reviews states that "[d]espite the one novella and interesting science, ...this is only the skeleton of something better".[1]

gollark: If you get used enterprise ones, actually not much.
gollark: I may or may not be doing this.
gollark: I think the best way to do compute is to write all your programs in Lua and offload them to random CC servers.
gollark: I hope to one day offload the significant CPU load of some computers to the C L O U D via a ReichOS-like setup integrated into potat OS.
gollark: *builds 1GB RAID array*

References
  1. "The Gateway Trip". www.kirkusreviews.com. Kirkus Reviews. 24 November 1990. Retrieved 30 December 2019.
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