313 pages
Published 1977
Read from April 21 to April 29
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
Does it get any more standard-issue masculine sci-fi than this? Robinette “Bob” Broadhead, a man with psychological issues he can’t bring himself to discuss with a therapy-bot, has longed his whole life to become a prospector, manfully manning his way through space to win manly riches with his masculine prowess. Luckily for him, a new frontier opens through the titular Gateway, a hollowed-out asteroid full of ancient alien spacecraft aimed at the universe, permitting manly colonialist-minded men the opportunity to make men of themselves manhandling the cosmos for fun and profit.
There’s deliberate irony to this, though, because so much of the story hinges on Bob’s cowardice and self-scorn. That said, it’s sometimes hard to tell what’s satire and what’s just 1970s masculinity. I feel I’m on safer footing when I parse the brutal, environmentally catastrophic corporatism of Pohl’s setting as a burlesque of contemporary capitalism, akin to his earlier The Space Merchants.
I only read Gateway for two reasons: I want to return to my old habit of reading classic SFF novels, and I happened to have a copy on hand from a used bookstore I visited years ago. My copy has, in fact, been sitting on my immediate to-read pile for an embarrassing length of time (since at least last summer).
The opening, which features our narrator refusing to open up to his Jungian therapy-bot, put me off reading it several times before now; the recurring therapy chapters of the book remain, to my eyes, its least essential aspect, tacked on to add some semblance of narrative complexity and emotional heft to a genre that had only just begun thinking about such things.
Recalling With the Night Mail, supplementary in-universe materials—classifieds, trip reports, extracts from lectures—are used to flesh out the setting and its perils and peccadillos.
Gateway is noteworthy for how normalized queerness is in its future society. Our narrator, however, is an unreconstructed homophobe, to the point where he (cw: partner violence) tries to kill his girlfriend for sleeping with a bi man, and later masturbates thinking about said bi man, which feels extremely 1970s. It rather blunts any modern appreciation for the setting.
Also extremely 1970s is the obsession with Freud. Pop psychosexuality pretending to be gritty depth: that’s what Gateway means to me.
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