I think he launched his friends and Klara directly into a black hole and that he’s forced to live with this guilt. Of course it's tragic how many people got killed trying to unlock the secrets of the Heechee but that gave the whole endeavor a kinda frontier flair. This leads Robinette to be bisexual seeking younger incarnations of his Mother to screw while guiltily having homosexual tendencies.

How his mother dies, not getting her replacement lung because there is either money for that or Bob's treatments, was yet another typical example of a futuristic human society where human life isn't actually worth much if anything and it was really sad.Los Heechee son unos seres extraterrestres que dejaron una serie de naves en una estación con destinos previamente establecidos.

in a journey into himself as perilous and even more horrifying than the nightmare trip through the interstellar void that he drove himself to take! The discovery of an ancient abandoned alien space station together with hundreds of ships is an interesting premiss, but the execution feels terribly dated now – in fact the book feels like it was published early sixties, not the late seventies. What's worse is there's no indication that Pohl is aware of this fact about his hero as no real attempt is made to redeem the lead character.

You can earn a lot of money when you make a new discovery - an unknown star or a new planet in an other solar system, or when you find signs of alien intelligent life and things like that. But greedy brave souls are still willing to risk these death lottery missions because a rare few of them result in the discovery of yet more alien technology, which can then be reverse-engineered and patented and everyone winds up very rich, most particularly the omnipresent Company (TM). He is awarded a sizable bonus because his route saves about 100 days of travel time; the windfall is partially offset by the large penalty for incapacitating his ship. I appreciated Pohl's critique of capitalism, as well as his willingness to depict a future teeming with gender/ethnic/sexual diversity, but most of those depictions are as stereotypical and unflattering as the arrested adolescent that passes for the novel's hero. Like my 15 year old self I went in expect a Big Dumb Object fun times, something along the line of Rendezvous With Rama, what I ended up reading turn out to be a fairly slow moving character study within a sci-fi setting.