Customer Reviews

Gateways

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I thought this was a collection of stories in the style of the Gateways books, which remain one of my all-time favorite sci-fi stories. Part treasure-hunt, part roulette wheel, the original Gateway stories have you biting your nails all the way along as you worry about the characters in their very dangerous profession of exploring ancient space routes left behind by an advanced, ancient race.

This collection is an appreciation of the Gateway stories, not more Gateway stories. People talk about Fred Pohl and what his stories meant to them and heap praise on him, which he deserves, but this gets dull after fifty pages. This work had one positive side effect, which is that it reminded me of the original books and made me run to the library and check them out and re-read them, which was hugely enjoyable.

Overall, this book is a bore. It's for industry insiders who were friends of Pohl's and readers who were big fans and want to hear little details of other people's relationship to him and his work. It's not what I really wanted, and in my disappointment I have given this work only two stars.

This very cool collection of stories inspired by and recollections about Frederik Pohl by some of the premier SF authors in the field today was put together by his wife, Elizabeth 'Betty' Hull, for Freds 90th (I think..) birthday. As many of my regular (hahahahahaharofl) readers will know, I consider Frederik Pohl to be THE Grand Master of SF. There has never been an author as visionary or as multifaceted as Fred, and there probably never will be.

As an aside, to anyone who wants to challange this with 'Issac Asimov', I say (redacted) off. Asimov was a brilliant feller, no doubt about it, but he couldn't write for (redacted again). Heinlein doesn't even come close either. Maybe Cordwainer Smith might be up there, or at a stretch you could chuck in Doc Smith if you're into that kind of thing, but Fred is the clear master to my mind. Gene Wolfe is as good, but not for as long, so far. For evidence to support this claim, see Platinum Pohl, the collected short stories from a year or two back - 100% brilliant.

Anyway, this book collects all sorts of stories by authors basically 'doing' Fred Pohl, mostly pretty successfully. I enjoyed spotting the secret Pohlgeek references and the stories were pretty good on their own anyway. Standouts for me were the work by David Brin, who I am not usually a fan of, and Cory Doctorow. And a massive bonus is that many of the old timers have contributed real life stories about Fred, which gives a real sense of the man beyond just his printed fiction.

If you like Fred Pohl, get this book. He deserves the honour, and the book certainly does him justice. If you don't like Fred Pohl, what the heck are you reading this for? Go get a John Grisham or something, you barbarian.

This collection contains one good long story by David Brin that one might have wished would have blossomed into a novel to encompass all of the pages of this book, a couple of slightly below average short stories, and several really bad stories. Overall, it is one of the weakest collection of any genre that I have ever purchased. It is really the case that the dedications to Pohl are generally better than most of the fiction. If you are a great fan of Pohl, you will enjoy these. But otherwise there is just not much here. I threw my copy away rather than have it waste useful shelf space.

just purchased and downloaded to my Kindle. so far so good. The Kindle formatting is excellent -- no formatting errors so far. I'm tweeting along with the David Brin story via my Kindle ([...]). More later.