Gateway, by Frederik Pohl, is very much in the grand tradition of 'hard SF'. Whereas much of what gets put in the science-fiction section of bookshops is actually little more than fantasy with lasers instead of swords, Gateway is part of the Arthur C Clarke, Bradbury and Asimov school that seeks to extrapolate fantastic worlds from real current science, and examines how science and technology could affect the peoples of those worlds. In the future, Earth is massively over-populated - and starving. Food is synthesised from hydrocarbons, and there's not enough to go around. Life is brutal and grinding poverty is everywhere. For the bravest, however, ...  Read the complete review

I rate really good books on how many times you can re-read them and still get as much enjoyment out of them as the first read. I’ve read perhaps hundreds of good books in my life, but only a few I would call really great on the basis I can read them repeatedly and still be engrossed by them. The three stories I would count as being great (they are all sets of books) are The Lord Of the Rings, Orson Scott Card’s Ender saga (see my earlier Op on Ender’s Game) and Frederik Pohl’s Heechee saga, the first book being Gateway. The saga comprises of Gateway (1976), Beyond The Blue Event Horizon (1980), Heechee Rendezvous (1984) and Annals Of The ...  Read the complete review

A race called the Heechee, whose civilisation flourished far before that of humanity, have left behind a unique legacy: Gateway. On it are a large number of spaceships of several different designs, each with pre-programmed routes stored in their databanks. The catch, however, is that no human has ever been able to decode the routes the ship’s have been programmed with, and there are no Heechee left to reveal the secret; the only way to find out where a ship is going is to press the start button and let the ship fly along its predesignated path. The Gateway Corporation was set up to take commercial advantage of the Heechee technology. For a hefty sum of ...  Read the complete review