Gateway

Published under the SF Masterworks series, Gateway by Frederick Pohl is the first in his Heechee saga. A vanished alien race, the Heechee have left thousands of small spacecraft in an asteroid-cum-spacestation dubbed Gateway. The human race has had little success reverse engineering the technology behind the ships and the Corporation who administers the station on behalf of half a dozen governments (including Venus) lets so-called ‘prospectors' launch the ships to whatever destination they are set in the hope of finding more tech or even the Heechee themselves. A dangerous process of trial and error, the trips can be deadly (ending up too close to a star) or too long, ending in starvation.

Having won the lottery, food shale miner Robinette Broadhead (variously known as Bob, Robbie or Robin) lands on Gateway, does the training, then finds himself too scared to fly. He becomes romantically involved with a couple of women, drinks too much, eventually signs up for a launch (no luck that trip), incapacitated his ship on a second mission before hitting it big with his third trip but at a huge and tragic cost.

Told in flashback as a now rich Bob is psycho analysed by ‘Sigmund' an AI psychiatrist the story is interesting enough to hold one's attention, if very badly dated in places (smoking on spacecraft; a questionable attitude towards “gays”; and a shockingly graphic act of violence towards a woman).

The story is novel but, given human ingenuity, the inability to understand the alien tech except at the most basic level somehow doesn't ring true. The main protagonist is hardly likeable and the story really only gathers pace in the last quarter of the book, once we get to go on actual missions. It's good but not great in my opinion.

Masterwork? Hmmm...