Tor Books (October 1, 2004)

Frederic Pohl's latest installment in the Heechee Saga once again follows a handful of intrepid explorers who sacrifice everything to try their luck at the Gateway ships, hoping to win incredible riches. Once again, it's clearly a novelization of several short stories, credited at the beginning.

Something's gone out of Pohl's bleak vision of desperate dystopia though. That's not an entirely bad thing, it was wearying to maintain it through the early Gateway stories, the horrible chance that you'd come back with nothing, or that you'd run out your savings on air and water just waiting for an open ship. After all, the Heechee have finally been discovered, first through a food factory orbiting near the gas giants, then eventually direct contact with the Heechee civilization that has withdrawn to within the black hole that lies at the core of our galaxy.

(Pohl admits that his physics are a bit off with the civilization in the core, but it was a good guess when he first penned the idea, and he's chosen not to revise it.)

In any case, we don't spend quite as much time dwelling on the bleak desperation of the first two characters we meet, a pair of young boys from Istanbul who become prospectors. There they meet a girl from the U.S., who eventually pairs up with one of them on the first voyage to the core.

We also follow Wan Enrique Santos-Smith, the boy who was the sole survivor of the one-way trips to the food factory that preceeded it's successful discovery. Raised by the primitive ape-men left aboard by early Heechee, he turns out to be a spoiled rich-kid and a rather too-convenient villain to drive the story and pull together the short stories that make it up.

One of these stories is "Hatching the Phoenix" from 1999, in which Gelle-Klara Moynlin pays for a scientific expedition to study the Crab Nebula supernova. Klara is brought back into the later chapters, but adds little to the plot.

Besides some rather weak exploration of relationships with the enigmatic Heechee, who's alien-ness is chiefly that they do not communicate much with our heroes, the meat of this novel is some exploration of the life of the stored and artifical "machine mind" personalities. A fire and brimstone preacher is "saved" by the "Here After" company, and because he has no assets for them to claim he is sold into slavery (on a weak excuse for justification) to Wan, in spite of his vehement denunciation of machine life. The "stovemind" - a massively over-capable AI chef ends up saving the galaxy in the "spare" time that the relatively slow "organic humans" reduce him to.

There is some exploration of the similarities in the time differential that AI's experience in dealing with organics and the time differential caused by living within the galactic black hole. Frankly, though, the figure of 40,000 to 1 chosen by Pohl is too vast to really be explored or grasped. As a day passes for our heros, centuries pass in the outside galaxy, and mankind quickly "matures" to a culture of tourist-followers who mostly move to join the Heechee in the black hole. This is in spite of the fact that the threat that originally sent the Heechee fleeing is presented as weak and irrelevant to the "modern" age - though that should be hard to pin down, it persists as the early post-contact age.

In all the book's a fun read, though not very substantial. Pohl is clearly a short story writer, pressed by contract and publicity to novelize stories that should be left to stand alone. The tone of the assembled novel is far more hopeful than his earlier work, but frankly that's as much a weakness of the challenges characters face rather than any particular strength they posses.