1977 Hugo- and Nebula-award-winning science fiction (and the Locus and
Campbell too). The mysterious and vanished aliens known as Heechee
left behind a space station in solar orbit, and lots of small FTL
spacecraft attached to it. But humans haven't really worked out how to
navigate them yet.
Which means that the "prospectors" who try new course settings,
in the hope of finding some really valuable alien artefact and making
their fortunes, are the poor and desperate. The Corporation is making
a note of the course settings they use and which ships don't come
back, and is very slowly building up correlations, but taking a ship
out is still a huge risk.
This is a promising setup, but unfortunately we see it all through the
eyes of Robinette Broadhead, who got out of the food mines (processing
shale oil into basic nutrition for Earth's starving billions) by
winning a lottery, and is essentially cowardly and incurious, not to
mention thoroughly stupid, self-interested, and narcissistic. He beats
up his ex-girlfriend for sleeping with another man (when he's just
been sleeping with another woman), and blames her for provoking him.
Our hero, folks.
It's a very 1970s-feeling book, with Freudian therapy (which is Right)
and primal screams, and people having tawdry casual sex apparently not
because they enjoy it but because they assume it's a thing people do.
Oh, and homosexuality is Scary. Women are "girls" even when they're
naval officers, as long as they're young and pretty. There are no
women in this book who aren't young and pretty, and Rob sleeps with
most of them. Because the narrative alternates between rich Rob in
therapy now, and poor Rob trying to decide whether to go out
prospecting back then, there's very little tension: we know he will
survive and get rich, and we soon find out that he feels guilty about
something bad that happened to a particular person. The only thing
really in doubt is whether he's actually to blame for whatever it was,
or just thinks he is, and since he's such an uninteresting and
unsympathetic character I couldn't find it in me to care.
While it's dressed in the clothes of a Big Dumb Object story like
Ringworld or Rendezvous with Rama, this ends up being much more in
the style of Budrys' Rogue Moon, a psychological piece about a
subject I couldn't find engaging.
Followed by Beyond the Blue Event Horizon. Reread for Neil Bowers'
Hugo-Nebula Joint Winners Reread.
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