"Gateway" by Frederik Pohl

Gateway is set in a future in which humanity has discovered the remains of an ancient advanced alien race, referred to as the "Heechee", originally from ruins on Venus and later through the discovery of "Gateway", an space station-converted asteroid which contains thousands of working Heechee spacecraft. Through trial and error, humankind has discovered how to launch and return the spacecraft to one of a large number of seemingly pre-set interstellar destinations, travelling faster than light and typically taking on the order of two weeks to a year to return, but with no control over or prior knowledge of the destination itself. Calling for volunteers to pilot the spacecraft, the "Gateway Corporation" who manages the discovered station provides those willing to risk the trip a chance at discovering a fortune in ancient artefacts and scientific knowledge. Of course, the typical mission results in either a boring, unfruitful destination or gory death at the hands of stellar phenomena, exobiotic infection, starvation or madness.

Bob Broadhead, a disadvantaged worker from the food-producing shale-mines of Wyoming, is a willing volunteer who comes to Gateway after a chance lottery win buys him the flight from Earth. When he arrives he falls in love with a fellow volunteer, Klara and bides his time waiting for the "lucky mission" to come up. After his third mission, Bob has struck it rich, returned to Earth and now lives a life of big spending, easy living, fast women and "Full Medical". "Full Medical" includes a weekly visit to an artificial-intelligence Psychiatrist, (who Bob nick-names "Sigfrid von Shrink"), with whom Bob discusses his issues of anger, guilt and denial following the deep psychological trauma experienced during his final mission. The novel moves back and forward between chapters of Bob's time on Gateway and his visits to Sigfrid, where Bob struggles to come to terms with talking about his experiences on Gateway. It is eventually revealed that during his final mission, Bob jettisoned a compartment of the ship containing nine fellow crew members, including his lover Klara, in a moment of terror in order to save himself from being consumed by a black-hole that the ill-fated mission had arrived at. The time-dilation induced by the black-hole means that although years have passed since the event for Bob, now back on Earth, only minutes have passed for his fellow crew members, and this knowledge leaves Bob with an extra burden of guilt that he wrestles his every day.

When I first saw the front-cover (and the blurb) of the book I wasn't expecting a great read (don't get me wrong, I really enjoy SF art but I assumed that the cover was making up for the lack of a quality piece of literature). I was pleasantly surprised that Gateway was actually quite a good read; the concept of the random-destination Heechee ships was well executed, the characters were engaging with appealing personality flaws and the story kept a good pace and was generally exciting. I found Bob to be generally unlikable (his violence, misogyny and irrationality) but somehow this didn't ruin the book for me, as it usually would. Throughout the book there are little inserts of Gateway brochures classifieds ads, mission reports and transcripts of Heechee science lectures that add to the background story and scene setting; these were an effective mechanism for exploring the premise of the novel's setting and I quite enjoyed them.

Overall, I wouldn't say Gateway is on my favourites list, but I would recommend it for science fiction fans.