The Gateway Trip: Tales & Vignettes of the Heechee

Heechee Saga #5

by Frederik Pohl, Frank Kelly Freas (Illustrator)

Here is a collection of short pieces about the many marvelous discoveries made by humankind using Heechee technology. Each piece includes illustrations by Kelly Freas.

Contents:
The Visit (1990)
The Merchants of Venus (1972)
The Gateway Asteroid (1990)
The Starseekers (1990)
The Home Planet (1990)
Other Worlds (1990)
Heechee Treasures (1990)
Looking for Company (1990)
The Age of Gold (1990)
In the Core (1990)

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Short Stories, Science Fiction Fantasy, Space Opera, Collections, Adventure

241 pages, Paperback

First published November 14, 1990

About the author

Frederik George Pohl, Jr. was an American science fiction writer, editor and fan, with a career spanning over seventy years. From about 1959 until 1969, Pohl edited Galaxy magazine and its sister magazine IF winning the Hugo for IF three years in a row. His writing also won him three Hugos and multiple Nebula Awards. He became a Nebula Grand Master in 1993.

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection that includes Pohl's terrific novella The Merchants of Venus and nine other shorter works set in his Heechee universe. Cynics may argue that he was simply cashing in on his notes and notions, which may in part be true, but what's wrong with that? It was one of the richest and most imaginative set-ups of modern science fiction at the time. It was fun to get a viewpoint other than that of Broadhead's or Sigmund's perspectives, and I really enjoyed the book, which is lavishly and delightfully illustrated by the great Frank Kelly Freas. It's not necessary to have read Gateway or any of the novels to appreciate this volume.

[Razvan Banciu · Rating 2 out of 5]

The main story about the "merchants" is quite ok, but, in my humble opinion, the other ones are dull and boring.
Nothing remains from them the second after you've finished reading...

[Elessar · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5/5

Este quinto libro de la Saga de los Heechee es más bien complementario, ya que no continúa por donde se quedó el cuarto. No obstante, ha sido el segundo que más me ha gustado de todos, por detrás de Pórtico, claro. Esta última entrega está formada por una novela corta y varios capítulos que sirven para contextualizar al lector en el mundo de las novelas de la saga: la situación terrestre del momento, el origen y las características de los Heechee, las principales misiones que llevaron a descubrimientos de estos seres... Un montón de información en poco más de 200 páginas. Además, cuenta con muchísimas ilustraciones de Kelly Freas, todas con un toque muy pulp y de gran calidad.

Me ha sorprendido gratamente este libro, después del fiasco que supusieron los últimos de la saga. Especialmente destacable es la novela corta Los mercaderes de Venus, me ha parecido buenísima. Hasta aquí llega mi viaje con los Heechee, una aventura que empezó muy bien, pero que pronto empeoró y no logró remontar hasta esta final entrega.

[hotsake (André Troesch) · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.25/5
This felt more like a textbook of the Heechee universe than a collection of self-contained stories, but Pohl's writing is always enjoyable and readable.

[Ira (SF Words of Wonder) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Check out my full, spoiler free, series review HERE.

The first part of this short story collection is a novella called “The Merchants of Venus” which was written in 1972 and is the first mention of the Heechee. It’s about a tour guide on Venus that takes rich people out to see what the Heechee left behind and hopefully find some alien artifacts that could be worth some money. The novella was great and shows off Pohl’s great writing and sets the stage for what was to come with the classic Gateway.

The rest of the collection goes over a variety of missions that different Gateway prospectors go on, some good missions, some bad. These short stories, or Gateway Trips, also summarize a lot of what happens throughout the entire series, even giving more details and context to things that were just glossed over in the novels. If you read all 4 Heechaa Saga novels, then I think you should definitely read this collection too.

[Jeraviz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cuando nos ha gustado un libro o una saga, siempre hemos querido saber más sobre ese mundo, esos personajes o esas situaciones que se hablan de pasada en la historia principal pero que por motivos de ritmo literario (es decir, no hacer libros de 1500 páginas) no tienen cabida.
Pues Frederik Pohl reúne en esta colección de relatos todas esas misiones de los exploradores de Pórtico que siempre hemos querido saber, cómo fue la primera llegada de un Heechee a la Tierra, o cómo fue el primer contacto con una inteligencia extraterrestre.
Para quien haya leído la saga completa es un buen punto para cerrar todos esos cabos que se van comentando a lo largo de 4 libros.
Para quien todavía no haya empezado, me atrevo a decir que si lo leen podrán sumergirse en la atmósfera que construye Pohl ya que tampoco hay grandes spoilers.

[Claudia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although is not a sequel, it contains the journeys made by first prospectors after finding the Heechee ships, stories told by Audee Walthers, known to readers from the previous books in the series. It doesn't really bring anything new - just few more events and consequences of what Heechee meant to humankind.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 3 out of 5]

My 1991 booklog says: "B, kinda disappointing. Outtakes & story frags.

[Mark Hartzer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here is my pro tip: Skip "Gateway" and Pohl's idiotic narrator and just read the good parts, ie. this book. Why bother with the tedious psychoanalysis and tiresome lead character when you can simply read about the aliens and that background?

Also, an extra star for Pohl using the word "appurtenant" without any reference to an "easement". Yay!

[Xabi1990 · Rating 3 out of 5]

7/10. Media de los 13 libros leídos del autor: 7/10

Aunque tiene este y muchos otros libros muy legibles, me quedo con su Saga Heeche y, en menos medida, con la de "Mercaderes del espacio"
Último libro que leí de la saga y bien. No maravilloso, bien solo.

[César Bustíos · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Jon Norimann · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Gateway trip is a book split in two. The first half is a decent novel about exploration of Venus. The 2nd half reads like a wikipedia article on the discovery of the Heechee, ie the first four book in this series.
In all this 3 hour read fills some holes from the first 4 books and is worth reading if you, like me, liked those. As stand alone SF its rather standard but at least its not long.

[Kathy Sebesta · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a Heechee fan from way back but I don't remember ever reading this. Despite the subtitle there is only one actual story here and it is one I've enjoyed at least once in an anthology. Everything else is explanations of all things Heechee, from first hint to where-are-they-hiding, none of which is terribly interesting since all were eventually worked up into longer worx.

[Punk · Rating 4 out of 5]

SF. These short stories fill in some of the holes left by the Heechee novels. They probably would have had more of an impact on me if the novels themselves weren't mostly one big hole in my memory, but I recognized most of the characters and stories these vignettes allude to. It's basically a clip show. It wouldn't make much sense to someone who hasn't read the Heechee novels, and if you have read them, you probably don't need to read this as there's not much new information in them. The longest piece, "The Merchants of Venus," clocks in at 100 pages and is a reprint of the novella that first introduced the Heechee. Everything else is bite-size and reads like an article in an encyclopedia.

I liked it anyway. C'mon. It's Pohl. "The Starseekers" was my favorite piece, giving background on how the Gateway Corporation, trying to get more prospectors in its ships, devised science bonuses for astronomical discoveries and some of the incredible things the prospectors found.

Four stars. My only complaint were all the foreboding, "If only they had known how important those microwave-sniffing thingies were! But that is a story for another time..." type comments. I paraphrase, but you get the point. That happens about once a chapter. And it gets old fast. OH, and it's illustrated in black and white pointillism, which is cute at first, but then the ladies start wearing their skintight jumpsuits unzipped to the navel and I get a little cranky. It evokes a pulp fiction sensibility, yes, but Pohl's writing is so much more than spacemen with rayguns and dumb chicks with boobs, so it's a little mismatched.

[Victor Villaseñor · Rating 4 out of 5]

subió mucho del 3 y 4, no alcanza al primero ni al segundo , pero hace que te den muchas ganas de volverlos a leer.


Lean Portico, tiene de los cierres más canijos que me ha tocado leer

[John Tetteroo · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Heechee Saga is one of my most favourite space exploration series. As such this paperpack was a re-read for me. It seems I had forgotten most of the action and could find proper enjoyment in rediscovering the heechee universe.

The first story in the bundle, actually a novelette reads most like a Heechee novel. I like the overemphasized capitalist approach of space exploration. Pohl draws up a very harsh and cynical humanity that uses it's citizens as cannon fodder in a macabre high stakes Russian roulette to find out by trial and error how to navigate the new-found alien space ships. I guess when we would do this for real, we would fund them to the max to enhance succes rates. Or would refrain from sending fortune hunters. But where would be the drama in that.

The other pieces are not actually stories but more scketches or alternative history lessons on the exploration of space and the discovery of the aliens. Seems like a string of time-line pieces Pohl wrote in his process of universe building. This is the weakest part of the bundle. I found myself skipping some parts because I already knew the facts from the other novels, or I simply didn't care who died where in what attempt.

Fun part of this paperback are the sci-fi comic illustrations by Frank Kelly Freas. Almost every page carries an illustatrion by this scifi icon. I really love his style, but sometimes I had a hard time keeping my own fantasy view of Heechee undiluted by the Freas imagery. Distracting in more than one meaning of the word, this can be off-putting to some.

All together a nice read, but I do prefer a full novel. This paperback seems a bit of over emphasized capitalist milking of an already succesfull series by the author. I hope it turned out well for him and got him on full medical service... three stars

[Cesar Gil · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is subpar compared with the four previous ones. One might get the idea that the five books comprise one story. Actually the four previous books tell the story in sequence and this fifth book is just a later set of isolated stories.

While the grand story of the Heechee saga is a real page-turner and brilliant, this fifth book has none of this. I felt like pushing to read it to the end. I even wondered if I should just give it up, which is rare for me. It contains basically one new story which comprises about half of the book and is kinda-sorta interesting, with a twist of fun in the end. All the rest of the book is tutorial repetition of what was previously mentioned in the other books, so these repeated explanations add no interest for someone who has already read the saga, while they would seems confusing for someone who hasn't read it. I saw no point in these short texts. Even the aggregation of the short chapters in sections lacks meaning.

It feels like there is some goal lacking, some point, or some vibrancy at all. Like after a big success with the four books in the saga, they decide to produce some more literature and just put together a patchwork and rags and whatnot of previous events.

Save for some savvy and humorous insights here and there, related to the author's ability to imagine what would happen in face of future technology, the text is just a patchwork. Maybe here lies the real secret of the text, as these occasional insights discuss human character and make suggestions in a lighthearted form.

[Patrick Scheele · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is basically the book version of of one of those old clip-shows we used to get on tv. Or maybe they still exist, I wouldn't know. Anyway, we get a summary of the whole Heechee saga as well as "The Merchants of Venus", a novella-length story, set on Venus before the discovery of Gateway. That was... well, fine I guess. A bit old-fashioned in how people behaved, but I can't fault an old book for being old-fashioned, can I? The problem I had with it is that the whole story leads up to a big Heechee discovery, but we never get to see that. We also get some brief anecdotes of later discoveries, but they were so summarized I couldn't really bring myself to care.

I should really stop falling for the trap of thinking that sequels to classic books like Gateway will, even if not on the level of their parent book, be at least enjoyable reading. That is rarely the case, it seems writers don't usually understand what make their good books so good, so when they try to replicate the formula in a sequel, it just falls flat. There are so few exceptions to that rule that I can't even remember any of them off the top of my head.

[James Garman · Rating 3 out of 5]

The series is a total of 5 books, but this one is really not part of the arc with the other four. It is a separate volume.

In this, we go back during the earlier days of the Heechee discoveries, and see how humans learned about the Universe by riding along in the ships that they could not, at least at first, control. Over time, they learned a bit and of course after the Heechee came on the scene, a lot of what they had tried to understand was revealed.

It also was made clear that one of what human's used the technology for was different from how the original species did. And in some cases, we even improved it.

There was a bit of let down, at least in the first part of the book, and i found myself wondering if this book was worth the read, but ultimately decided it was enjoyable. Not sure I would have wanted to read it, however, if I hadn't already read other four.

It might have worked better, however, to have incorporated some of this information into the other books. I might have had a cleared idea how it all fit together.

[Óscar López · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a unique volume in the Gateway saga. It’s comprised of 10 short stories – prominently, “The Merchant of Venus” (1972), which was the first published story in the Heechee universe. The other 9 are vignettes detailing particulars of the Heechee mythos.

It works great as a summary of the 4 previous books, a kind of encyclopedic reference of the interesting exploratory, technological and societal elements that frame the other novels. They spoil a surprise or two of the preceding books, without revealing too much. As a bonus, this book is profusely illustrated with drawings that range from adequate to funny to downright weird.

All in all it’s a nice companion that reminds the reader of all the cool parts of the Gateway novels, without a single mention of that pesky protagonist that ruined the last two volumes. Its only fault is that it doesn’t bring anything new to the table, and by now we all know how the story went.

[Eran · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's good that I took the time before reading this one, I wasn't sure if I'd get back to it and remember things after several years passed since I've read the previous books. But it's actually mostly a recap book - so it worked out well enough. If I would have read it back when I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it and it would have felt too reparative to previous books. As it is, it was nice if not very good.
There isn't really any new world building here. Previous books already took all the tech and alien culture ideas to their extremes. Instead it starts with a nice story on the already established surrounding. But then the following stories are just a list of things that were told or mentioned in previous books.
Again I find myself thinking that 2 stars seems too little, but the semantic rating of "it was ok" is more correct than "liked it".

[David Chess · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heechee without Robinette Broadhead!

This is a fun collection of stories and vignettes and notes on the universe of the Heechee, set when the mysterious aliens were still purely mysterious, and known only by the as-yet-unsolved puzzles they left behind.

They don't even have Robinette Broadhead, the protagonist of Gateway and most of the rest of the HeeChee stories, who was quite the character at first, but became less interesting and more annoying as the HeeChee artifacts and ultimately the HeeChee themselves became less mysterious in the later books of the HeeChee Saga.

So this is, in a way, a nice bit of nostalgia for those who've read the whole rest of the Saga, and probably an interesting introduction to those who haven't. The initial novelette is a bit dated and I thought a bit longer than it needed to be, but still good old-school SF.

[ALICIA MOGOLLON · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great companion reader to the first four Heechee saga novels. I feel like this could be a pretty good guide to how technology could be used to actually serve all humanity. Pohl, like others before and after has written a wonderful and exciting series of human trial and ultimate conquest over social ills using the theme of utopic or semi-utopic technological advancement. I would say definitely the latter in Pohl's case. Semi-utopic because in his future society while might poverty be eliminated, there is still crime. So there were some things he wasn't able to envision technology wise and there were ideas that he broached but didnt really expand on. He also doesn't seem to question the ideas of property, hierarchy or wy there should be any sort of inequality at all.

[Matías Picó · Rating 3 out of 5]

Este epílogo de la saga de portico, es un libro independiente donde a través de diferentes narraciones , Pohl entra en detalle sobre algunos aspectos de la historia que en los libros principales quedaban un poco de lado.

Si bien , en líneas generales no parece aportar mucho, me queda la sensación de que si Pohl hubiera malgastado menos paginas en la disquisición psicológica interminable de su infumable personaje principal, en contarnos lo que se cuenta aquí, la saga hubiera ganado enteros.

Nota:6/10

[Jason Bergman · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an unfortunate book. The few actual stories in here are quite good, and worth reading. The problem is the rest of the book, which reads like a Wikipedia entry for various parts of Pohl's Gateway series. That's not necessarily a bad thing, except if you've read the series, all those chapters are entirely redundant, and offer very, very little in the way of new information. It's a shame, because the Gateway series is so great, and I was hoping this was a collection of short stories set in it.

[Matías · Rating 3 out of 5]

Este epílogo de la saga de portico, es un libro independiente donde a través de diferentes narraciones , Pohl entra en detalle sobre algunos aspectos de la historia que en los libros principales quedaban un poco de lado.

Si bien , en líneas generales no parece aportar mucho, me queda la sensación de que si Pohl hubiera malgastado menos paginas en la disquisición psicológica interminable de su infumable personaje principal, en contarnos lo que se cuenta aquí, la saga hubiera ganado enteros.

Nota:6/10

[Durval Menezes · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting book:a collection of sequential, basically chronological short tales all passed in the Heechee fictional universe, telling a coordinated 'history' from discovery of the first artifact, to the point just before humans and Heechee finally meeting.

All of these tales, except the first one, are told from a third-person perspective and in an integrated voice/style that makes the whole set a joy to read.

Recommended to everyone who read the main 3 books of the Saga and liked them.

[Florin Constantinescu · Rating 2 out of 5]

Companion collection to the Heechee saga, this collection is just another excuse to re-print the decently good novella "The Merchants of Venus" where the first mention of Heechee appears.
The remaining "stories" in this collection hardly read like fiction, they are more like summaries of the books in the "main sequence", or meta-fiction if you will, and can be happily skipped.

[Joseph Santiago · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book took a little time to get into with the old computer language mixed in with therapy. I ended up loving it. This was thought provoking looking at the year it was written and amazing that it stands the test of time. This is a good read.

Mr. Joe

[Dragan Bogdan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short stories connected with the gate (maybe novelettes), but I was unable to find anything new - a few stories and consequences of what Heechee presence and technology, impacted the humankind.
I was unable to find the Heechee saga juice into it.