Hugo & Nebula Awards: Best Novels discussion

The spoilerific discussion thread for Gateway.

Finished this but it was a struggle. Robinette is completely unlikeable. I tried to have sympathy for him but just couldn't. The story of a world struggling to feed its population and Gateway and its working were interesting.

Ellen wrote: "Finished this but it was a struggle. Robinette is completely unlikeable. I tried to have sympathy for him but just couldn't. The story of a world struggling to feed its population and Gateway and i..."

Yeah, it's been years since I read it so I can't recall if Pohl was aiming for an unlikeable protagonist or if this was accidental. But one of my biggest memories of reading this is being absolutely repulsed by the brutal domestic violence he inflicts on his partner late in the story, and after leaving for awhile comes back and starts up with him again like nothing ever happened. It was one of the most egregious normalizations of domestic violence I'd read up until that point, and tanked my enjoyment of the book.

My review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

and as to the unlikable character I agree and honestly I think it is way easier to write a likable character, therefore it is actually a plus for the novel as a literary work

A few links for a broader picture
1. On learning of the death of Frederik Pohl by Jo Walton https://reactormag.com/frederik-pohl-...
2. on the novel: https://reactormag.com/frederik-pohls...

thanks for the links--interesting stuff

I am really ambivalent about this book . . . it's the structure of it. I hated the foreshadowing. Plus, I hated the whole psychiatrist thing. But I really liked the story and the whole mechanisms and the mystery of the heechee. (Makes The Expanse look like nothing but a copycat.)

I'm hoping the rest of the series does not have the same foreshadowing mechanism. I hate previews. because I would really like to read them all, but only if the structure is more straightforward.

Now back to The Snow Queen, which I wasn't loving

Kateblue wrote: "(Makes The Expanse look like nothing but a copycat.)"

I've thought of the Expanse too. Also about Bruce Sterling's story, where he compares a human in a similar Gateway (there w/o ships) to a fly at an airport - it can accidentally travel across the globe and if lucky return

Rebecca wrote (over in the NO SPOILERS thread: "However the flippant, introspecting white male protagonist that seems to pop up a ton in older SF is not very compelling. ."

Strange, I did not think that he was introspective. In fact, I thought he was a whiner he was trying to avoid introspection, which made his continued visits to the computer doc unbelievable (at least to me.)

I felt that the whole computer doc thing was a bad idea because:

1) I hate previews of stuff-I would have preferred a straightforward telling of the story

but more importantly:

2) the whole thing was a writing gimmick used to kinda make a story question--because, when you look at the plot afterwards, there's not much to it. A straightforward telling of the story (which I would have preferred) might not have sucked people in to the point where they kept reading.

That being said, I liked this book and want to continue the series. Definitely

Kateblue wrote: "I felt that the whole computer doc thing was a bad idea because.."

I, on the opposite, liked the cybernetic psychoanalyst, for it works on several levels:
1. as a satire of psychoanalysis (even a robot can do it)
2. as a way for the protagonist to get info what the doc really 'thinks'

Gateway is one of my favorite novels, perfectly mixing the Old-School spaceship sci-fi with more person driven stories.

In my opinion the Cybernetic psychoanalyst is a stroke of genius as it allows us to understand the story gradually in the order Rob faces up to it in his sessions with Sigfrid.

It also adds a brilliant AI perspective on humankind, in the very last sentence "You asked me 'Do you call this living?, And I answer Yes it's exactly what i call living And in my best Hypothetical sense, I envy it very much"

I liked the foreshadowing, both when I read the book first time some decades ago, and now again, when I sort-of-remembered the plot. Like Kateblue, I felt it was a bit strange/borderline-unbelievable that Robinette would continue seeing the robo-shrink, when he was so hostile to it during the sessions. Of course, as the book progresses, we can see that his hostility is mainly a coping mechanism, a way to avoid facing his feelings of guilt. But still, if he has so powerful repression going on, I'd think he'd skip the psychiatric help altogether.

One thing that I can't really understand, though, is how Robinette became the only survivor from the black hole expedition. The situation, as I understood it, was that the Fives came to normal space on the edge of the black hole, too deep to use their chemical rockets to escape the gravity well.

So first of all, why didn't they simply use the hyperdrive to get back to Gateway? Since it's FTL, it should actually be able to escape even from the black hole itself. But fine, let's assume there's a reason why the hyperdrive doesn't work so near a black hole. Not that any such reason was given in the text, but whatever.

Therefore, their plan as I understood it was to link the two Fives lander-to-lander, move all the unnecessary stuff to the lander "below" (i.e. closer to the black hole), move all the people to the "top" ship, blow the chemical rockets in both the landers up, and use the shockwave to escape from the gravity well. Fine.

But Robinette gets stuck to the "bottom" ship, somebody pushes the button to blow the whole setup and then... somehow the "top" ship with the other nine prospectors ends up plunging to the black hole, and Robinette's ship escapes? How does this work? Did I miss something in the explanation? Did I somehow misunderstand the whole setup they were doing? What happened there?

Oleksandr wrote: "A few links for a broader picture
1. On learning of the death of Frederik Pohl by Jo Walton https://reactormag.com/frederik-pohl-...
2. on the novel: https://reactormag.com/frede..."

Acorn, thanks for that link to the wonderful obit/remembrance of Pohl by Jo Walton,

I bought a book this week that I expected to be good but which turned out to be great. It's Robert Silverberg's Science Fiction 101, which consists of 13 short stories of other authors, with short essays by Silverberg about why they are important in the evolution of the genre. [I think I had read ten of them already, but I'm still glad to have this book.] It ends with Pohl's "Day Million."

Thanks for the rec of Science Fiction 101. I think I will try it also

Antti wrote: "Therefore, their plan as I understood it was to link the two Fives lander-to-lander, move all the unnecessary stuff to the lander "below" (i.e. closer to the black hole), move all the people to the "top" ship, blow the chemical rockets in both the landers up, and use the shockwave to escape from the gravity well. Fine.
."

I understood it a bit differently. The idea is from physics like this one: https://www.vaia.com/en-us/textbooks/...
So they maxed the mass of the 'throw-away' ship to get the momentum from 'throwing' it, but due to an error, the 'wrong' boat (with our survivor) was thrown out, dropping the other into the hole

Oleksandr wrote: "I understood it a bit differently. The idea is from physics ."

No, we understood it the same way. But if you do a set-up like that, where you want to throw (or in this case, blow) stuff away from you in order to move, you will have to throw that stuff to the opposite direction you want to go. In this case, you want to go away from the black hole, so you have to throw the stuff towards the black hole.

So in that case, shouldn't they have made their set-up in a way that ensures that the abandoned ship will be thrown in the black hole? How come it was possible that the wrong ship ended up getting away? I can't paint the picture in my head, and the book doesn't explain this at all.

Antti wrote: "So in that case, shouldn't they have made their set-up in a way that ensures that the abandoned ship will be thrown in the black hole? How come it was possible that the wrong ship ended up getting away? I can't paint the picture in my head, and the book doesn't explain this at all."

Assume they appeared at the same distance from the hole's center of gravity (for simplicity call it parallel to each other), so there is no 'closer to the hole' ship. Another possibility is that the ships orbit each other (actually a point between them), so at each given moment one ship is slightly at a better position, but neither keeps it

Oleksandr wrote: "Assume they appeared at the same distance from the hole's center of gravity (for simplicity call it parallel to each other), so there is no 'closer to the hole' ship. "

I don't think this would work, since in this setup, when the other ship gets "thrown" away, it wouldn't end up in the black hole, and the other wouldn't really get that much further from the event horizon. In order for their plan (and Robinette's feelings of guilt) to make sense, you have to assume that the sacrificial ship is thrown directly towards the black hole, in order to maximise the benefit to the other ship.

"Another possibility is that the ships orbit each other (actually a point between them), so at each given moment one ship is slightly at a better position, but neither keeps it."

This could be the answer. Although since they were hauling stuff from ship to ship we have to assume that the ships are physically connected to each other. But perhaps one could assume that the ships were rotating around their connecting point for some reason. I don't know why you'd want to do that (to generate pseudo-microgravity?), but it's at least a possibility.