A short re-read here while I work on some more ambitious re-reads in coming weeks (Raymond Chandler and Fanon’s “On Violence” among them.)
Gateway is a book that I remember grabbing me very hard on first read, when I was in graduate school, so quite a few years after it was originally published. Unusually, it’s a book that my partner also liked—she’s not a huge fan of speculative fiction generally.
I picked it up at the London branch of Forbidden Planet, which was pretty much a weekly destination for me while I was working on my dissertation. I think if I’d tried to read Gateway when it first came out, as a teenager, it would have turned me off very hard—I generally preferred likeable protagonists and more upbeat settings when I was reading speculative fiction at that point. Depressing characters, adult relationships and serious themes were fine but I wanted them in more literary work. By the time I was in college, I stopped having those expectations and my tastes in fiction generally broadened and deepened.
Gateway’s basic premise struck me from the beginning as absolutely calling for a TV show even back then when “SF TV show” meant “cheap special-effects, cute kids, and cornball scripts”. The basic set-up is that humanity is in desperate straits on an environmentally devastated planet controlled by runaway capitalism and there’s only one ray of hope. An artificial asteroid in the orbit of Venus created by now-absent aliens has a bunch of FTL ships in it. No one has figured out how the technology works or how to understand their navigational controls, but if you get in one and press the right buttons it goes somewhere, and after it goes somewhere you can press another set of buttons and it will come back. Sometimes it goes to another abandoned base of the same aliens or a planet they used to live on or visit, and you can visit those in a lander that’s attached to the ship. Sometimes it goes nowhere at all, or to somewhere that used to be a destination but whatever was there is gone now. Sometimes that’s right next to a star. Sometimes that’s at a black hole.
Most of the time the people who go out—the ships are big enough for one, three or five people—don’t come back. Or they come back dead: burnt, crushed, starved, fatally wounded. If they do, maybe they come back with knowledge about a destination worth returning to, with resources worth having. Or with some artifacts and junk left behind by the vanished aliens. They get paid. Sometimes they get rich.
In some ways, it’s as if the TV series Stargate SG-1 was built around a travelling technology that a corporation controlled rather than the military, where the gates went to completely random locations (including instantly lethal ones), and where the issue wasn’t security against malign aliens but a desperate search for profit and survival undertaken by desperate people. I still think the book would be a great template for a series—and it’s been optioned multiple times and is under option now, though there’s no news on whether it’s going to be developed further.
Re-reading it is an odd feeling. On one hand, the basic set-up is far more distressing now in terms of its relevance: a planet dying from climate change and capitalist extraction, with everyone but a small elite living utterly miserable lives of desperation. Getting to the Gateway asteroid and gambling with your life on every trip is a dream come true for the protagonist and many others: people give up limbs and organs, even terminally ill children, just for a chance to play Russian roulette. If you were compiling a list of speculative works about climate change and the Anthropocene, this belongs on the list. Some respondents at a Tor.com re-read of the book by Alan Brown said they found the book “too cynical” in this respect, which makes me wonder whether they’re paying attention to the world they live in.
On the other hand, the protagonist is genuinely an unpleasant person who physically and emotionally abuses women. That was hard to read then; I find it much harder now. It still works only in the sense that it heightens the claustrophobic and violent feel of the world the “prospectors” (those who take their chances in the alien ships) live in, and it feels certain to me that Pohl very much meant to reproduce the feeling of a new settlement at the site of a major mining strike—people from all over thrown together, a constant tension between holding together in solidarity and looking out for number 1 at all costs. There’s more than a little feeling of Treasure of Sierra Madre and A Fistful of Dollars here, except that some of the prospectors are women (and even families). Every crew has the possibility of treachery and violence hanging over it, but also isolation, loneliness, jealousy and a good chance of an unpredictable death. (Most of the trips take a long time and there’s nothing much to do and nowhere really to hide from the other people.)
The framing device doesn’t work as well now for me as it did on first read. We know that the protagonist is wealthy and living amongst the tiny elite who have comfortable lives on Earth. He’s guilty and unhappy and is being psychoanalyzed by a computer who is about two evolutionary steps above Eliza. Over time we discover he’s got one major reason to feel guilty and quite a few less major ones (though in some ways the thing that weighs most heavily on the character I think is the action that most contemporary readers would forgive in comparison to a lot of the rest of his behavior). He’s just not very good company overall: cowardly, calculating, neurotic, misogynist, violent, self-loathing. He’s psychologically realistic, mind you, and I think that was probably what really grabbed me back then, considering that there weren’t very many SF characters like him, or at least that I had encountered as main characters in my reading up to that point.
I think if there is an adaptation of this book at some point, it’s likely going to need to change this to some extent. It’s fine to have all the main characters be damaged and flawed people who hurt one another emotionally and even physically and who are being preyed upon constantly by a corporation that relies on their pain to make a buck—that makes the psychological tension of the voyages a more potent source of risk even than flying into the photosphere of a sun or landing on a world with lethal pathogens that eat through protective gear. But I don’t want to be locked inside the head of one character like that as much as Gateway requires you to be. It’s a genius premise and a powerful setting, but the character work will need a new coat of paint.
I remember reading this in your London bedsit and being pretty glued to it.