Customer Reviews

The Boy Who Would Live Forever: A Novel of Gateway

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Fred Pohl returns to "Gateway" with perhaps the series' most lightweight entry to date. We follow two young would-be explorers who have the misfortune to be out on a failed prospecting trip when Robinette Broadhead discovers how to read/set the Heechee spaceship controls. The two explorers, a young woman and a younger man, end up signing up for a trip to the core. Along the way they become lovers (surprise!), and most of the book deals with their effort to fit in with the Heechee at the core. We also find out that the lovers spend a lot of time in the sack.

The supporting characters are not terribly well-fleshed out. I guess that's appropriate given that they are either Heechee (very little flesh) or stored/machine intelligence. Pohl must really be a gourmet, as one (machine) character is a cook who goes into excruciating detail - over and over - about the meals it prepares. Said cook also turns into an intelligence officer along the way as a plot to kill millions of Heechee dominates the last third of the book.

You'll see a lot of old favorites here. The Kugel (aka the Foe) put in an appearance, as do Gelle-Klara Moynlin, Sigfrid Von Shrink, the Gateway Corp, the Old Ones, and a host of familar Heechee. Rob Broadhead, while frequently mentioned, does not put in an appearance - in person or otherwise.

If you've read the series, you'll get warm fuzzies from visiting our old friends again, but "...Forever" does not stand on its own. Pohl assumes you've read several other novels in the series; you'll be lost if you haven't.

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This is the latest, and perhaps final, chapter in the Heechee Saga, begun 28 years ago with his classic GATEWAY. "Boy Who" isn't in that class -- none of the Heechee sequels are -- but it's decent, readable, clever and fun.

For a quick reprise of the Heechee series, and a nice reiew of this book, Google the ever-reliable Paul Di Filippo.
Sample: Frederik Pohl is 85 years old. His first story was published more than 60 years ago. The Gateway sequence itself is now nearly 30 years old. Despite-or perhaps because of-all this history, Pohl's new book remains a feast and a pleasure.

"Boy Who" is in part a fixup -- you are most likely to have already seen "Hatching the Phoenix" (1999), in which Gelle-Klara Moynlin pays for a scentific expedition to study the Crab Nebula supernova. The blast also incinerated the planet of the "Crabbers", a decidedly unsympathetic race of aliens. It's a crackerjack story, reprinted in the Dozois Year's Best --though its connection to the rest of the novel is tenuous. Two other previously-published stories are more smoothly integrated.

So the novel reads a bit choppily -- but there's lots of cool Pohl stuff here. My favorite character is Marc Antony, the Stovemind AI. His primary duty is cooking up gourmet meals for humans and Heechees, both organic and machine-stored -- but his collatereal duty is Human-Heechee Security, and who Saves the Day! from the nefarious star-smashing plot that's the McGuffin here, and is a decidedly less-interesting part of the book.

Ol' Fred isn't getting any younger, so I'm very pleased to recommend his latest novel. Recommended for Pohl fans -- and who isn't?


Review copyright ©2005 by Peter D. Tillman

Simply disastrous work by Pohl. After throroughly enjoying the original Gateway, I was looking forward to this sequel. My hopes were utterly shattered. In summary, here is why this book was totally unreadable.
1. The main characters, Stan and Estrella, are totally unbelievable. Their dialogue is only slightly above kindergarten level. They are never given any motivation for their actions.
2. Pohl fills the pages with useless details, including information about plantlife, and cooking, as well as vomitting and bowel movements. I gave up on the book completely when he decided to indulge in an entire page about one man going to the toilet. Maybe he was trying to be funny. It didn't work.
3. Total lack of plot development. The book is basically a loosely connected series of random events, stuffed with filler. Mid-way through the book Pohl begins to introduce entirely new characters in an attempt to generate some kind of plot momemntum. I have never read a more unfocussed science fiction novel. It comes off as really poorly done space-opera.
4. Characters are completely flat. Stan and Estrella are both sickeningly dumb. Every other character is the exact same cardboard cutout. Aliens act just like humans except they talk funny. It is very cheesy and lacks any attempt at originality.
5. Book has an insane number of sex scenes, and they are all badly written. I mean literally, you cannt go more than 15 pages without a sex scene. So juvenile.

I would go on, but I believe my point is made. This book has not a single redeeming feature. If you enjoyed Gateway, DO NOT ruin your memory of it by reading this sequel.

This book is readable, but it's no "Gateway". Mr. Pohl gets too cute a bit often. Buy this book "used" if at all possible. On the other hand, his note at the end is fairly amusing when you consider the changes in our understanding of black holes since he wrote "Gateway".

Like many others, I too was thrilled to see Frederik Pohl was even still writing, let alone writing books about the Heechee saga, which I loved. So, I grabbed this book off the shelf - hard cover or not, this was a Heechee book!

But... Now I've read the book, I wonder just where exactly did Pohl intend to go with the book? It starts somewhere towards the end of the original Heechee sage books, but spends copious amounts of time summarising and rehashing the stuff from the previous novels - in case we have forgotten, I guess. Then finally we move on from refamiliarising ourselves with many of the old cast of characters and go...

Nowhere. I mean, the characters of yesteryear seem to be bland colourless carbon copies of themselves, the new characters seem to have barely been sketched out before being relegated to Bland Land. And despite a promising title, at the end of the day, I'm not even sure who the "boy" is, and if living for ever means having a baby, well... Hardly a revolutinary plot line! I believe that would imply we are all currently living forever right now as long as we procreate?!

Anyway, the book was a fun read, it was light, somewhat witty and not unbearable. But it was shallow, directionless, meaningless and with little plot. I can only hope that like the first Red Dwarf book that came out, this one is going to go somewhere in another book????

I have just finished this book and put it down with a big yawn. There is a mix of characters and points of views, introducing of new characters (sometimes interesting as Marc Anthony), boring the reader with other characters even the author seemed to be no longer interested in after some chapters, and a very unsatisfactory solving of open threads (Wan). The Heechee parts are amusing and have the old Gateway feeling but that is pretty much all that is left from novels 1-3. And the endless obsessions about food might be amusing in the beginning but is soon getting really boring.
All in all this seems more a sum of sketches and scenes hold together by some strained plot than a decent book as we know and can expect from F. Pohl.

I was quite excited to find this book at the local bookstore a couple of weeks ago. The previous four "Gateway" novels are among my favorite SF novels, with inventive aliens, interesting characters and strong plotting. In marked contrast, "The Boy Who Would Live Forever" is an aimless ramble that adds nothing to our knowledge of the Gateway universe, its characters, or anything else. One example will suffice. In "The Annals of the Heechee," we get a chunk of information about the Foe. They are interesting and worth exploring further. So, in this novel, we get about 3 pages with the Foe, in a completely unbelievable situation, and then the Foe never turn up again! This novel is tedious and uninteresting, and fans of "Gateway" should ignore it and pretend that the series ends with "The Annals of the Heechee."

it"s a real part of the gateway saga,not a sequel :)..you will meet everything and everybody you already knew, but the story is original and captivating.

Baeing a avid Fred Pohl reader and being throughly entertained by the earlier Gateway novels I expected this to be a strong finish to the series. Instead what we have is a weak rambling story that bears little or no resemblence to the source. It left me wondering "Mr. Pohl what happened?

As aliens go, Frederik Pohl's enigmatic and often elusive Heechee --- created more than a quarter-century ago to propel his popular Gateway series --- have proven difficult to fathom. They aren't morally or socially tidy aliens, with a clear-cut agenda for good or evil. They seem inconsistent and illogical at times; their language (even in English "translation") is all but impenetrable; and they have a maddening tendency to keep the likeable but rather clueless humans in THE BOY WHO WOULD LIVE FOREVER persistently off-balance.

But that's clearly just what Pohl intends. Ever the artist-at-play, he wants us to scramble feverishly after Stan and Estrella, whose spur-of-the-moment choices are sure to land them in big trouble. As omniscient readers, we soon begin to feel rather protective and parental toward this guileless young couple who collide on the Gateway space station in search of (what else?) fame, fortune and adventure --- the dreams they can no longer afford on Earth. How can we not follow them pell-mell into the Core, a black hole whose bizarre time dilation turns even five minutes to long-past centuries back "home"?

Yes, it's the old, old story of escape, renewal, self-discovery and romance, brought about by conditions so strange that nothing can be termed impossible. But it's the way Pohl has his characters live and tell it that makes THE BOY WHO WOULD LIVE FOREVER such an appealing, if somewhat meandering, page-turner.

Right up to the whimsical ending, Stan and Estrella are faced with numerous choices and opportunities as they learn how to live among the mercurial and eccentric (by human standards) Heechee and connect with other diaspora earthlings scattered among planets in yet-unheard-of universes. What they do choose is disarmingly "ordinary" --- to make good, and better, lives for themselves and all the displaced beings the Heechee brought home with them as living "souvenirs" of interstellar travel.

What Pohl does so beautifully and subtly here is to celebrate what it's truly like to be different, not merely alien. Stan with his ever-diminishing immaturity, Estrella with her disfigured face and the uncertainties of new motherhood, and their emotionally disturbed Heechee friend Achiever, are all challenged to grow and discover not simply how to be good, but to become fully themselves, as good beings. And that's pretty important if you're stuck in a universe where you could well end up living forever!

THE BOY WHO WOULD LIVE FOREVER is vintage off-the-wall Pohl from beginning to end, a distinguished addition to the award-winning Gateway series that has turned the science fiction world on its ear for more than 25 years. Highly recommended.

--- Reviewed by Pauline Finch