Chasm City
BSFA Award winner; a standalone noir that many readers rate the most purely enjoyable Revelation Space novel, and proof the universe could carry any genre dropped into it.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is Gateway about?
Inside a hollowed asteroid, the vanished Heechee left a thousand starships with preset, unreadable destinations. Climb in, launch, and you might return rich; you might return starved, irradiated or inside-out; mostly you don't return. Robinette Broadhead won the lottery out of the food mines, flew three missions, and came back the richest man alive and broken in a way he can't say — which is why half the novel is his sessions with a robot psychoanalyst he calls Sigfrid von Shrink. The slow excavation of what happened near the black hole is among SF's great guilt narratives.
Why it matters
Swept the Hugo, Nebula and Campbell awards. Routinely listed among the best SF novels ever; the prospecting-the-incomprehensible premise echoes everywhere from Roadside Picnic comparisons to modern 'big dumb object' fiction.
Where does it sit in the series?
Pohl's sequence beginning with Gateway: humanity rides the abandoned starships of the vanished Heechee, gambling lives on destinations no one can predict.
In the Guide from Heechee Saga:
- Gateway (1977)
Read next
The City and the Stars
A masterpiece of far-future SF whose computer-stored citizens anticipate mind-uploading by decades; its mood of luminous melancholy influenced generations of British SF.
The Dark Forest
Source of the Dark Forest hypothesis, now genuine currency in Fermi-paradox and existential-risk debates — the rare SF concept to cross into scientific discourse with its name attached.