Gateway (Unabridged‪)‬

This book is good, but kinda abruptly ends leaving you hanging. This is made up for in the second book which is a must read. Beyond the blue event horizon.

This is a masterwork.

The source material won both the Hugo Award (awarded by science fiction readers) and the Nebula Award (awarded by science fiction authors), and with excellent reason. "Gateway" is a very rare sort of science fiction novel: one in which the focus is humanity itself. Most science fiction, particularly "classic" science fiction, is about plot, or premise, or setting... the "science". The characters themselves have historically been secondary, and not well-realized. "Gateway" breaks with that pattern, and does so in spectacular fashion.

The story follows Robinette Broadhead in two tracks: his rags-to-riches adventures in exploration using a cache of alien spaceships discovered years ago on an asteroid, and his psychotherapy sessions years later in which he explores with a computer-psychoanalyst why being wealthy and famous have not made him happy. We skip back and forth between "then" and "now", with Robinette's defensive verbal jousting with his analyst echoing the actions of the past. Both stories build in tension together, following themes of self-doubt and identity, meeting in the final chapters which have something depply profound to say. Unlike so many other books in this genre (even the most acclaimed), our point-of-view character is powerfully human, with flaws we all recognize and strengths we doubt we have. Though this book is certainly not suitable for children or early teens, Frederick Pohl has given science fiction something it sorely needs: the human touch. And oh, how well he did.

That's the book. Now, as to the reading...

Oliver Wyman, the performer, has succeeded in delivering a warm, emotional, riveting performance. Given that the story is a first-person narrative by the focus character, and that the story is all about exploring deeply-buried emotions and painful memories, the task for the performer is a very difficult one. Too cold and the book loses precisely what makes it great. Too over-the-top and the story is trivialized. A very careful line needs to be walked, and Wyman nailed it. You can hear the rage, the doubt, the prideful blustering, and the tears... Wyman communicates the heart of Robinette Broadhead with a raw clarity that is vanishingly rare. Even the psychoanalyst-computer is given just the right touch of personality, just the right amount of depth to make him a person worth knowing. In so doing, Wyman raises the bar of expectation for all other science fiction readings. Other performers and authors, take notice.

Now if there were just more science fiction to read that is this... human.

Terrible writing, even worse narration. Never goes anywhere. Waste of time.