Recent Reads

The Gateway Trip : Tales and Vignettes of the Heechee, by Frederik Pohl. As the subtitle suggests, this is not a novel or even a collection of short stories. "The Merchants of Venus", the tale of a cynical, hardboiled type who takes a couple of wealthy Earth tourists on a search for alien artifacts on and below the surface of Venus, qualifies as a novella. Its tone and language suggest that it may have been written long before this book's publication date of 1990. The remainder of the book reads like a scriptwriter's "bible", an authorial outline and set of rules for a long-running story arc. It contains several interesting vignettes, but no characters whose stories extend beyond a few pages outside of the novella mentioned above.

As such, it would be of great interest to fans of Pohl's various Heechee novels and stories, or to anyone who wants to get the gist of their setting without spending a lot of time reading multiple volumes. Readers looking for more traditional SF storytelling might want to start with Pohl's published stories and novels dealing with the Heechee, and then explore this volume if they're curious about the timeline and background that underlies them.