Enchilada Relaunch

A review site for Hugo-winning novels and other works of interest

Monday, February 27, 2006



SF31

A week has passed since the 31st Boston Science Fiction Festival and I think I've recovered enough to order my thoughts in something readable. For more information on the festival, see the post below this one. (I guess there’s some advantages to updating this blog so infrequently!) This year the madness took place at the West Newton Cinemas, just a half-hour or so west of Boston.

(Despite the title, the festival has never actually taken place in Boston.)

What separated SF31 from the two other times I’ve attended was my lack of sleep. Due to a then minor cold, I took some Sudafed the night before in the hope of getting a good night’s rest. Hah! It ended up keeping me up the whole time, meaning I had an hour and a half of sleep under my belt before the four hour car ride down to Massachusetts and the 24 hours of movies. More on that later...


Short: BAMBI MEETS GODZILLA (1969)
Absolutely hilarious short subject. Imagine really pretty, pastoral music playing as images of Bambi frolicking in a field float by. The opening credits roll on and on for minutes, deliberately stretching out the inevitable. Then, after the director’s name finally fades away, a giant scaled foot descends from the sky and obliterates Bambi. “The End” comes up and then long, drawn-out ending credits precede for a minute. I’m not sure if this short is supposed to be making fun of Godzilla, Bambi or film credits, but it’s a gem nonetheless.

Movie: SERENITY (2005)
Firefly: The Movie. I really wanted to hate this one, as Firefly fans are some of the most annoying residents of the online sci-fi community. Alas, it was actually a pretty enjoyable action romp. I do think it suffers from some of the same problems as the Trek movies, with too many characters and in-jokes. But it was enjoyable, and I’ll probably check out the TV show at some point.

Movie: KONGA (1961)
Oh, boy. Michael Gough plays a British scientist who takes a chimpanzee named Konga, gives him some injections of genuine Mad Scientist Formula Growth Serum and watches as Konga turns into a giant ape. Yes, I wrote that correctly -- the “growth process” inexplicably turns Konga from a chimpanzee to an ape. Then Konga goes on a rampage and gets shot to death next to Big Ben. Not on top of Big Ben, just standing next to it. Apparently this film was first titled “I Was A Teenage Gorilla”. Says it all, really.

Movie: THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION (1984)
The cast is incredible: Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Jeff Goldblum, Christoper Lloyd, Robert Ito, Vincent Schiavelli, Yakoff Smirnoff and about a dozen other recognizable faces. There are fast cars (including one REALLY fast car), space ships, alien Lectroids, mad scientists, rock’n’roll, watermelons and endless chase scenes. Take all of these elements, roll them together and what do you get? A genuine mess, that’s what. Nothing in this two hours makes any sense at all, but it’s sort of enjoyable for the first two-thirds. “Just remember wherever you go, there you are…”

Movie: THE TINGLER (1959)
Vincent Price figures out that every human in the world has a lobster-like creature called the Tingler attached to his or her spine. He extricates one woman’s Tingler, which then goes on a rampage. After reading that, I’ll forgive you for not believing me that this is a really good movie. The best part is a scene which breaks the fourth wall: the Tingler gets loose in a theater and Price turns off the theater lights (i.e. the screen goes blank). He then instructs the “theater” to scream at the top of their lungs so as to paralyze the creature. Everyone does, of course. When this film was first released, certain theaters were hooked up so that the seats would deliver mild electrical shocks at this moment. I can’t imagine any filmmaker getting away with that nowadays…

Contest: TIN FOIL HAT CONTEST
“Make a hat out of tin foil to keep out the alien rays!” I didn’t participate in this, mainly for reasons of exhaustion. Some of the hats were very impressive, though.

Short: THE BATMAN, EPISODE I (1943)
The first episode of 15-part serial featuring “The Batman” fighting evil Axis agents over a supply of radium. Complete nonsense, brought down even further by some really racist anti-Japanese comments made by the main characters. The funniest part of this episode was the inside look at “The Bats Cave”, which was just a cave wall with a desk in front of it!

Movie: STEAMBOY (2004)
A recent anime film, depicting an alternate Victorian England in which advances in steam technology have allowed huge, hulking monstrosities of machines to be built; these are mainly used to fight other huge, hulking monstrosities of machines. This is a Japanese film, so of course our hero is a boy genius who wants to topple every baddie this side of Toky... err, the Thames. Steamboy is beautifully rendered and very imaginative, but slows to a mind-numbing pace as the final hour descends into “Oh, you think your machine is cool? Well, let me show you what mine can do!” over and over again.

Movie: KING KONG (1933)
Oh, man, this one sucked. I’d much rather watch the 2005 version, or better yet the definitive 1976 remake, than this crap.

Movie: THE CRAZIES (1973)
One of George Romero’s first films. It’s about a town under siege from transformed humans and the civilians' attempts to survive. Where have I seen this plot before? OH YEAH, EVERY SINGLE OTHER GEORGE ROMERO FILM EVER MADE! I guess you have to credit the guy with consistency, at least. This time the threat is in the form of the “Crazies”: regular townsfolk who have been exposed to a bioweapon that causes hysteria. Most people express this by running around screaming, but one woman takes to sweeping the outdoors! Romero must have realized this wasn’t the most compelling menace ever, since he basically ignores the Crazies for much of the film to concentrate on the tensions between the U.S. Army and their quarantine program and the uninfected who are trying to escape. The absolute low point of this film is when a father rapes his own Crazie daughter and it is left to the viewer to decide whether he is infected or just perverted. Not of Romero’s better efforts.

Movie: NAKED MONSTER (1985-2005)
Movie: EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS (2002)
At this point my body told me to stop watching movies and to go get some sleep. I complied, finding an unoccupied corner on the upper level of the theater. I slept for five hours, a complete turnaround from last year’s festival when I stayed up the entire 24 hours. Again, no regrets on this – I was beginning to get a little delusional from lack of sleep, and had convinced myself that when you sleep you need to “dream through a book”. This was causing me angst, as I couldn’t think of any books to dream through. I think I finally decided on a cookbook, before collapsing.

Movie: THE LAST MAN ON EARTH (1964)
The benefit to taking such a long nap is that I was totally awake for the final four films. I’d seen this Vincent Price feature before and enjoyed it greatly. The plot is the natural endgame of a Romero “Living Dead” movie: the entire Earth has died and been reborn as “vampires” (basically zombies). Only one person is still human, holed up in his house from the constant threat outside and fighting daily for survival. It’s a really compelling and grim film. Recommended.

Movie: ANDROID (1982)
A charming tale of Max 404, the robotic boy who dreams of living as a normal human. His dreary and lonely life aboard a space station is disrupted when three escaped convicts land and start engaging in less-than-polite behavior. This film really surprises with its quality; all of the actors turn in good-to-great performances and the geeky, awkward Max 404 is a protagonist I couldn’t help cheering for. Not quite a classic, but surprisingly close.

Movie: 12 MONKEYS (1995)
What needs to be said about this Terry Gilliam classic? Bruce Willis does his sullen thing as a reluctant time traveller and Brad Pitt fires on all cylinders as Jeffrey Goines, spoiled rich kid/complete psychotic/founder of “The Army of the 12 Monkeys”. This was the fourth or fifth time I’ve seen the film and I enjoyed it as much as ever. This is the first and last time I'll ever say the following: Brad Pitt can be awesome when he wants to be. He really can.

Movie: FIRE MAIDENS FROM OUTER SPACE (1956)
A direct quote from the SF31 program: “A crew of stiff upper lip Brits lands on the 13th moon of Jupiter to discover the descendants of Atlantis – beautiful women in short skirts, one doddering old guy (pre-Viagra), and “The Creature”. But that’s not the weird part: all the astronauts want to do is go home!” What else can be said about Fire Maidens? It is very possibly the most inept movie I have ever had the (dis)pleasure to see – we’re talking Manos: Hands of Fate level of badness here. Come to think of it, the monsters in those two films are about equally frightening -- which is to say, not at all!


So, that was SF31. An exhausting, exhiliarating trip to the stars and back.

Bring on SF32!

posted by Jon @ 9:09 AM

5 comments

Tuesday, February 22, 2005



SF30

This past weekend I attended the 30th Annual Boston Science Fiction Film Festival. This yearly torture fest involves sitting in a movie theater seat from noon one day until noon the next day while watching a bunch of sci-fi classics and a couple of real turkeys. It was my second time doing so, after Kim-Loi, my brother Peter and his then girlfriend (now wife) Rebecca braved all 24+ hours of SF29 last February.

There are many issues to tackle here, so I’ll start with the most basic: staying awake for twenty-four hours. I’ve always enjoyed sleep -- maybe not as much as others, but I need at least four hours to be able to understand anything that’s going on the next day, and seven to really feel well-rested. In fact, before this last Saturday night, I’d never gone a whole night without any sleep. At SF29 I slept for twenty to thirty minutes, but was drowsy and generally unaware for two or three of those hours. I didn’t want that to happen this year. Either I would be awake and watching the films attentively, or asleep and getting enough rest to appreciate the ones I did see. I opted for the former approach. I skipped caffeine on Thursday, Friday and Saturday and then began drinking it regularly about 1:00 AM Sunday. This method worked marvelously. I saw and comprehended everything on the screen. Naturally I felt like garbage on Sunday (Kim-Loi did all the driving home, thankfully), but a long night of sleep and I was more or less recovered by Monday.

The next big issue beyond staying awake is the question of exactly WHY someone would want to skip a whole night’s sleep to watch thirteen consecutive films and a handful of short subjects. The answer is the audience. If I just wanted to watch these movies I could do it more easily and restfully by renting them for home viewing. But watching these films with fellow science fiction fans is more than just watching these films with a crowd of people. These are folks who really love stories of rocket ships and giant monsters, who show up every February with their pillows and plastic ray guns to cheer on the adventures of Superman, Sky Captain and an ape-hating Charlton Heston. These people love their movies and are not afraid to show it. Similiarly, when they hate a film, they hate it vociferously, as well, and that can be just as entertaining.

I'm not just referring to the sub-MST3K comments some individual folks shout out during certain cheesier or less well-written films. Sometimes those sorts of jokes are hilarious, as often not. What I am really mean are those moments when the entire audience reacts in unison to an event on the screen. Everyone cheered when Godzilla appeared for the first time this year in the original 1954 Gojira. Everyone booed when a new 70’s disco tune started up in the 1980 science fiction disco-musical-disaster The Apple. It’s just an indescribable spirit that this movie festival has. I guess the best word is the one that is often used to describe this Boston marathon... “community.”

The last element beyond sleep deprivation and a room full of science fiction fans is of course the films. Here’s the SF30 line-up with some brief comments:

Short: DUCK DODGERS IN THE 24 1/2 CENTURY
The one constant at the movie festival over its many years. This tale of Daffy Duck fighting Marvin the Martian for control of Planet X may not be a classic, but even just watching it for a second year in a row has given me a certain affection for it. Little did I know this would be just the beginning of the Looney Tunes shorts...

Movie: SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW (2004)
My second viewing of this thing in a half-year. Actually, it came off better for me the second time around, since I didn’t have as huge expectations. I still think the second half of the movie is a bit of a let-down, with far too much time spent out of the cockpit (or in the cockpit, but with the plane underwater). Enjoyable, though, and the only recent movie besides Primer that didn’t stink up the joint.

Movie: GODZILLA (GOJIRA) (1954)
Before there was Mothra and King Ghidorah and the rest of the Toho movie monsters, there was Godzilla. This debut is a surprisingly dark film, with humanity being powerless in the face of a great destructive force. People are always kind of feeble in these films, but in Gojira there isn’t even another monster to distract Godzilla from his destruction of urban Japan. He just stomps away on humans and breathes his horrible weapon on Tokyo and nothing can be done to stop him (though some joker’s quip about getting a giant breath mint might be a good place to start). Quite a different film from the later entries in the series. I loved it.

Short: HARDWARE WARS
Fans of Star Wars, rejoice! The Millenium Falcon is replaced with a clothes iron and the Death Star with a waffle maker, but otherwise this is A New Hope done in 15 minutes. Not as funny as I’d been led to believe, but worth a viewing.

Movie: PRIMER (2004)
Where the heck did this come from? Never heard of the director, producer or any of the actors, but this is one of the most believable science fiction films in memory. Two anonymous engineers looking like they climbed right out of Office Space invent a time machine and start reliving days from their lives in order to lay bets on stocks and so hopefully retire early. Problems ensue when they find they can fit one of their machines inside another another, however... This is a mind-bending film and I won’t claim to have understood the paradoxes involved completely the first time through. If you like these sorts of movies and haven’t seen this, it’s a sure-fire rental (and 12 Monkeys and the original The Time Machine, for good measure).

Movie: SUPERMAN (1978)
One of the best superhero movies ever and a timely and fitting tribute to Christoper Reeve. There’s a lot of other really good performances in this one: Marlon Brando as Jor-El, Margot Kidder as Lois Lane and of course Gene Hackman as the magnificient Lex Luthor. One of the real highlights of the marathon.

Short: CHUBB CHUBB
Arghhh! I missed something! Ran out to Subway for five minutes (mmm, philly cheese steak) and so only caught the ending of this. Looked like an okay Pixary type of thing.

Movie: THX 1138 (1970)
Wow, George Lucas made something for me! I’ve never been a big fan of Star Wars (though I like the first three films), but THX 1138 is quite different from that revered trilogy. In a dystopian future, people are catalogued (the title is also the protagonist’s name) and choices are made by remote robotic voices. Donald Pleasence turns in a star performance as a sort of wonderfully ambigious sexual predator (though it’s only hinted that that’s what he’s after). An often slow film that was okay at 10PM but would have been murder at 3AM.

Short: OUTER SPACE JITTERS
Don’t get me wrong: I like the Three Stooges. As a kid, I loved them, even to the point of owning Moe Howard’s autobiography! This film is a disaster, though. Shemp is gone (and hence Curly is long gone), so we’re treated to 17 minutes of Joe “Oww.. that hurt!” DeRita giving it all he had. Which isn’t much. I think it’s a toss-up which late Stooge was worse, Joe or Curly Joe, and we were given the latter in the full-length Have Rocket, Will Travel at last year’s marathon! This one had a script that sucked even for a Stooges short, with the unholy three being sent to Venus as Earth’s ambassadors (!!) and fighting zombies. Completely wretched, and STILL substantially better than the Mr. Magoo short later on!

Movie: INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956)
Returning from vacation, a small town doctor finds out things haven’t been going too well in his abscence. Several people complain of a strange feeling that their closest love ones aren’t really as they appear. Fifties science fiction thrived on this sort of paranoia. Where it worked then, it still works now. Well worth watching.

Short: ANIMATRIX: FINAL FLIGHT OF THE OSIRIS
Don't remember a lot about this. Seemed as good as anything Matrix-related, I guess.

Movie: PLANET OF THE APES (1968)
“Get your filthy paws off me, you damned dirty ape!” What more needs to be said?

Movie: THE APPLE (1980)
If The Apple is to be believed, the world will end in neither fire or ice, but in disco. For in the far-future world of 1994, disco record labels will have merged with the government and their beat-filled leadership will guide us all. But look! There’s our hero, a guy who looks like he’s in Foreigner but sings like he’s in the Carpenters! This disco musical is pretty much a complete fiasco from beginning to end, but terrific entertainment at 2:30 in the morning with a room full of screaming fans. A rousing chorus of “That sucked! That sucked!” over the closing credits indicates to me that I enjoyed this one more than many people in the audience.

Movie: STARSHIP TROOPERS 2: HERO OF THE FEDERATION (2004)
The plot revolves around a bunch of marines stuck on another world. They’re getting slaughtered by the giant bugs they’ve sent to destroy, so they decide to give up the fight and hide away in an abandoned fortress until rescue arrives. But is there a traitor in their midst? Does anyone care? The first film in this franchise was made on a budget of 170 million dollars. The second had a budget of 7 million dollars. Appropriately enough, the proportion of my level of enjoyment of the two films is about 170:7. The first film was a passable use of two hours. I can’t say the same for this movie, which has a direct-to-video ethic all over it. The worst movie of the marathon for me.

Short: HAREWAY TO THE STARS
An enjoyable bit of Looney Tunes, but this time it’s Bugs Bunny that fights Marvin and his Martian minions instead of Duck Dodgers. Don’t remember a lot about this one.

Movie: CHARLY (1968)
I just read the Hugo-winning novellete “Flowers for Algernon” a few months ago, so this was good timing. The plot concerns a mentally-retarded man who has his intelligence boosted by an experimental procedure. The central question of the novellete was whether he was better off before the surgery or not. The film ignored that question to focus on the effect of a human having high intelligence without a corresponding emotional maturity. Charly is a depressing movie, but there’s no question that it is also a very good one.

Movie: EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS (1956)
Flying saucers! Ray Harryhausen! Hugh Marlowe as a dashing action hero/scientist! Like Planet of the Apes, there’s not a lot to say about this. It’s a classic sci-fi movie.

Short: MR. MAGOO IN “SOME HORRIBLE LITTLE SHORT I HATED AND DON’T REMEMBER THE TITLE OF AND BASICALLY WANTED TO SCREAM THE WHOLE TIME IT WAS ON CAUSE IT’S REALLY NOT AT ALL FUNNY THAT SOME OLD GUY CAN’T SEE WELL”

Movie: THE FORGOTTEN (2004)
The premise of this film is a good one: missing children are being erased from history and the memories of them removed from their loved ones. Julianne Moore gives a good performance as the mother that refuses to believe her son never existed. The cast for this film is solid, with Moore, Anthony Edwards and three quality actors from the HBO dramas Oz and The Wire. There are many good elements to this film, but unfortunately it all falls apart in the second half of this film for two reasons. The first is that the producers/writers/director/whoever tried to make this a happy ending film -- a fatal mistake, in my opinion. The other problem is that the central mystery of the missing children is substantially more interesting than its solution. I won’t comment further for fear of spoliage.

Short: JUMPING JUPITER
If I had to send a third Looney Tune to do battle with Marvin the Martian after Duck Dodgers and Bugs Bunny, it probably wouldn’t be Porky Pig. This was similiar to the other two Warner Brothers cartoons shown.

Movie: THE TIME MACHINE (1960)
Time travel and/or altering recorded history appears to have been a SF30 theme, evident in Primer, Superman, Planet of the Apes and The Forgotten. And so The Time Machine seems like an appropriate closer to the festival. No, it’s not 100% faithful to the H. G. Wells original, nor is it filled with really memorable performances, but there’s still something quite endearing about the film. Maybe it’s the Morlocks. I remember them terrifying me as a child, but now they seem just kind of pathetic. And so I laughed as our intrepid time traveller punched the Morlocks, kicked them, burned them, pushed them into pits and just generally treated them like the buggy-eyed cannabilistic freaks they were. I kind of wish he'd have gone on to do the same to the Eloi, but that’s just me. A great closer to the ‘thon.

In summary, liking eleven of the thirteen films shown and all but one of the shorts is a darned good ratio. This was a stellar year for the festival in terms of line-up and audience reaction. I tip my hat to the organizers. I also curse them for making me wait 364 days until SF31!

posted by Jon @ 3:49 PM

12 comments

Thursday, September 16, 2004



Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man

Hugo Award for Best Novel, 1953


Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man occupies a special spot among the Hugo winners: it received the very first award for Best Novel. Many people have hailed it as a classic of the genre. Based solely on its reptuation, I even went so far as to purchase a copy for my brother a few Christmases back. I’d never actually read it, however, until a few weeks ago. How unfortunate that after all of that I can only respond with a profound sense of disappointment.

The first half of Bester’s novel is gripping and very well-written. The story goes something like this: Ben Reich, the longstanding corporate head of Monarch Utilities & Resources, Inc., and notable man around town, has a problem. His rival Craye D’Courtney is slowly taking away all of Monarch’s business. While things do not seem all that dire when the novel begins, we are led to believe that Monarch, and Reich himself, will eventually be forced into bankruptcy if something is not done. Being a crafty man, he hatches a plan to murder D’Courtney and escape detection.

(This murder becomes funnier when you realize I had been picturing Spacely Space Sprockets and Cogswell Cogs in my mind up to this point.)

While business-related murder is not entirely uncommon in our world, the future Bester describes makes such an act unthinkable. Telepathic abilities are so widespread among the populace that a successful premeditated murder has not been committed in over seventy years. Apparently all of the soon-to-be guilty parties project their plans so loudly that they are picked up before the actual event occurred. Even if a murder is committed successfully, the police would be able to ascertain a party’s guilt as soon as he or she were picked up and scanned. I’ll admit to being a little tainted when reading about this police work, having a natural predisposition against telepathic plotlines and having seen this exact same plot in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report a few years back.

The first half of the novel focuses on this murder and cat-and-mouse game. It is excellent. The problem is that Bester apparently ran out of inspiration. The second half of the novel is a complete shambles. Bester treats the reader to pointless scene after pointless scene, as a completely fake love story and a focus on secondary and tertiary characters derail the tight plotline. When the final shocking revelation comes at the end it is just a little bit late to have the right effect. It’s a shame. The second half of the novel differs in style, feel and plot from the first one so greatly that it almost feels like a different (and inferior) book.

There’s one interesting thing about the novel, though, that deserves a mention. As in the last book reviewed, Frederik Pohl’s Gateway, interesting games are played with the actual presentation of the text. When the telepaths in The Demolished Man talk to each other with their minds, these thoughts are expressed on the page in shaped text. If several are thinking at the same time, the text may run straight down the page in separate columns for example. If many are thinking all at the same time, the page becomes an explosion of phrases and sentence fragments. These telepaths even play games at parties, wherein one telepath will put his thoughts into an unidentified shape and the others will try to guess it. It’s an interesting literary trick, though again not one I need to see employed in any other book.

A few issues about Bester’s book bother me. For one, the very basic idea that killing D’Courtney will prevent his company’s eventual victory over Reich’s Monarch. Are the fates of businesses really tied that closely with their CEO’s health? Would killing Bill Gates or Sam Walton really end the dominance of Microsoft or Wal-Mart? I have some difficulty swallowing that idea. Indeed, the author tells us that one of the main reasons that Monarch is losing this war is that it doesn’t hire as good employees as D’Courtney’s business does. Wouldn’t it make more sense then for Ben Reich to blow up his rival’s HR department? Or better yet, just put out a superior product? Bester focuses little on the business side of this rivalry. It is a device simply to set up the murder.

Another problem I had with The Demolished Man is the “normal humans and psychic wonders” setting I’ve grown so tired of. As with so many other science fiction settings featuring these gifts, the assumption is made that the telepathically-gifted are superior to regular humans and will eventually replace them. I want to know who’s going to stand for this? Us normal humans would be up in arms at any sign of such a world coming. I don’t know one person that would like every thought they have to be out there on display for other’s perusal and enjoyment. Babylon 5 featured a telepathic police officer named Bester (can’t be a coincidence) who represented everything despicable about this sort of future. What that show got right, though, is that there wouldn’t be any peaceful settlement between the two types of humans. They would fight each other until either one side won or they went their separate ways.

It troubles me to write such a bad review of what is really a decent book. I can’t really help it though: The Demolished Man commits the worst sin a novel can. It displays all of the elements of a really great book and then fails to deliver them as a clearly developed whole. If Bester could have pulled off the second half of the novel with the ease and deftness he did the first, this would be an unqualified classic. As it stands, this is one half of a perfect science fiction novel.

Maybe that’s good enough for most novels. But not for a Hugo winner.


posted by Jon @ 8:29 AM

3 comments

Tuesday, August 24, 2004



Frederik Pohl, Gateway

Hugo Award for Best Novel, 1978



One of my earlier memories concerning my family’s beloved Apple IIe computer involved a program called “Eliza.” Though this program had been developed first in the 60’s as a demonstration of a possible model for artificial intelligence, Eliza has been circulated constantly on many platforms since then. She (or it, I guess, but the feminine seems a more comfortable fit) simulates one half of a conversation. Her method involves posing a question such as “How do you feel?” and then waiting for typed response. She reads in the response and attempts to formulate a response of her own. She’s not very good at this, of course, only being a computer program. For example, if you type “I feel sad,” her response will be “Why do you feel sad?” But if you type in “I feel dumbwaiter,” she’ll respond “Why do you feel dumbwaiter?” Eliza can only formulate her end of the conversation within the constraints programmed into her. She may give an illusion of depth, but in the end Eliza possesses nothing real in the way of original thought.

The reason I’m mentioning this curiousity is that, prior to reading Frederik Pohl’s Gateway, I would never have believed that a program of this type would make for a compelling character. The dialogue such a program outputs is by necessity formulaic. Yet Sigfrid, the “Freudian computer" in question, is a fascinating and very likable fellow. Pohl was probably familiar with Eliza, as he includes samples of Sigfrid’s programming in the text and it reads very much like the BASIC code on my Apple IIe would have. On the one hand, this dates the novel and Pohl’s vision of a far future computer, as it relies on what are now obsolete programming models. On the other hand, I was impressed with Pohl’s attempt to make Sigfrid realistic by seriously thinking through how he would be designed and what the nuts and bolts of his programming would involve.

It's not just Sigfrid, though. The whole work is impressive. Gateway stands out as one of the best designed and most emotionally involving science fiction works I’ve read. Before picking it up from the library a few weeks back, I’d heard vague things about the Heechee series, of which Gateway is the first entry. I wish I'd heard more. Pohl has created a rather simple but intriguing universe. Avoiding major spoilers, I’ll give a very basic history lesson for the purposes of this review.

A long time ago, in a galaxy not at all far away (in fact, it was right here) the alien Heechee built an empire based on their massive technological power before decided to take it all and leave for points unknown. Their clean-up job had one glaring omission, however. Inside an asteroid near Venus dubbed “Gateway,” humans have recently discovered a shipyard of nearly a thousand Heechee ships. I can’t spoil anything here, having read no further into the series, so I’ll put forward a guess that in later books we may discover this omission was no accident. The whole setup seems a little convenient.

The Earth’s nations quickly form a sprawling mercantile organization to exploit the newfound Heechee fleet. The Corporation has a major roadblock, however: no one can figure out how to work the darned Heechee ships. The technology is so far ahead of anything known and the language and symbols so foreign that humans are at a loss to get the ships to do anything we’d like them to do. So, the humans decide to work it the other direction and adapt their goals to what they can figure out how to get the ships to do. Two things are discovered: by pressing a few buttons, a ship can be flown to the last destination stored in its computer. By pressing some other buttons, the ship will return to Gateway. Each vessel becomes a ferry from one particular point to another particular point.

Thus a whole new profession opens up: that of prospector in this futuristic Gold Rush. A few week’s training is all that is needed to get someone ready to be a pilot (after all, the only skills needed are the ability to avoid touching any buttons). These journeys are not without danger, however. Quite a few of the prospectors never return, falling prey either to insufficient supplies (no one knows how long a trip will take before embarking), inhospitable destinations or strife between the crew members.

While there is great risk for Gateway prospectors, the rewards can be equally great. A pilot who returns from his or her trip with either new knowledge of how the Heechee technology works or some new Heechee doodads from the trip’s endpoint, can reasonably expect to make enough to retire on. A handful of pilots end their stay at Gateway as millionaires. Many more die or retire from trip-induced injuries. Some simply never return from their journeys.

The narrative of Gateway involves one such prospector, Bob Broadhead. Pohl describes two different time periods in Bob’s life, each one narrated in exactly half the chapters. The even chapters deal with Bob as a younger man who has recently won the lottery. Bob’s immediately quits his job in a Wyoming “food mine” (needless to say, the product garned via rocks dug up from the ground and a device called a “slime-skimmer” is unpleasant both to mine and to eat). Instead of retiring to a tropical island, Bob blows the entirety of his new fortune on a ticket to Gateway. This half of the story deals with his experiences there.

The odd chapters of the novel are something quite different. They describe Bob at a later era in his life. His prospecting days are over and he’s living the life of a rich playboy. Pohl intentionally (and wisely) omits many facts about what has happened between the two time periods in order to avoid spoiling the events of the earlier era chapters. What we do know about Bob is that something horrible has happened to him; he spends every moment we see him in this period in his psychiatrist’s office with Sigfrid.

The novel flows briskly, advancing the action and sense of mystery in both eras simultaneously. Pohl does an excellent job keeping the pace consistent between the two. I never felt like it was a drag returning to one time period, which seems like a very real risk in a novel following this structure. For a good half of Gateway it is not clear where the psychiatry storyline is going, though there’s enough motivation to find out what is wrong with Bob to keep the reader interested. The scenes involving Sigfrid and Bob are intriguing. Bob absolutely hates his weekly sessions with Sigfrid and will try any manner of tricks to outwit Sigfrid’s programming and keep the conversation away from the pain that Bob feels. Yet Bob keeps going to these sessions week after week. As readers we come to feel the urgency for resolution that Bob does without even understanding the nature of his problem. Some of the passages that explore the relationship between Bob and Sigfrid, particularly near the end of the novel, are among the finest I’ve read in science fiction. Pohl creates a very endearing relationship that is not all that different in substance than my experiences as a child typing input for Eliza’s perusal, but he makes it feel like an event of the greatest importance.

My theory on why Pohl dedicates half of the work to this relationship is that he sees it as a microcosmic view of the entire Heechee setting. Sigfrid tries to understand his patient by the rare pieces of insight that Bob shares and by a basic reading of his vital signs. Sigfrid is hampered, however, only being able to go as far with Bob as Bob will let him. Similarly, humanity tries to assemble a model for understanding the Heechee from the meager evidence left behind (mostly piles of debris and stripped out buildings). The scientists, pilots and administrators employ systematic and frankly rather uninspired methods to glean anything they can about the aliens, changing one setting at a time on each ship and seeing what happens. They repeat this over and over, desperate for understanding. Likewise, Sigfrid plays every game with Bob that his programming will allow, constantly needling Bob with repeated questions and carefully timed, unsettling comments. Humans and this Freudian machine aren't much different in Gateway; each is yoked with a giant mystery that is slightly beyond their capabilities to solve.

Before this review extends into the territory where further reading would occupy a significant fraction of the time it takes to read Gateway, I must mention a unique literary trick employed in it. Pohl intersperses supplementary material throughout the work. I’ve seen authors like Kurt Vonnegut include drawings in their works, but these were integrated into the text of the narrative. Fantasy novels like Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series sometimes include maps for the reader’s convenience. And of course many novels include footnotes for consumption after the book is finished. But I can’t recall seeing anything like what Pohl does in this novel, including classified ads, debriefing reports and professors’ lectures inside the text but without reference to it. I was never quite sure how to read these passages. Should I stop mid-sentence and read the supplementary material exactly where it appears? Or wait until the end of a section and go back and read it? I compromised: where the narrative action was too exciting to stop reading, I skipped the material for later perusal; where the action was moving at a slower pace, I would interrupt the story to read over these bits. It certainly is an interesting trick, but I’ll admit to being glad most novels don’t use it.

My last thought on Gateway is simply that I enjoyed it greatly. It’s one of the best books I’ve read in years and a deserved Hugo winner. It's also the perfect work to kick off this series and is sure to be a tough act to follow.

posted by Jon @ 1:36 PM

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