Resumo de Gateway - Frederick Pohl

This is no "Jetsons" future. There are no flying cars, no personal jetpacks, no robot maids.
Most times, the authors of science fiction novels are too giddily ready to advance technology far beyond the actual progress curve, giving humans access to unprecedented technology far ahead of its time.
This is why Frederik Pohl is so amazing. To read it, you would never think that "Gateway" was published in 1976. It has such a depth of precognition -- and a crushing sense of human vulnerability -- that it's easy to accept a future where each scientific advancement is crippled by an equally intriguing sociological problem. In "Gateway," man has achieved cheap and easy (if not exactly quick and safe) space flight, but most of the citizens of Earth are starving, subsisting on food extracted from the base hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen grown (of all things) on Wyoming shale and oil deposits.
Escaping the overcrowdedand impoverished hell of his home planet is Robinette Broadhead, a lottery winner who makes his way to the Gateway, a hollowed-out asteroid cicrling the sun. There,humans have found, saddled, but not tamedancient alien shuttles to explore strange new worlds -- if only they truloy knew how to fly them. It is another type of lottery that prospectors play, and the stakes are death. Broadhead and his fellow gamblers-cum-explorers must brave the unknown dangers presented by these millenia-old Heechee spacecraft, piloting them with no real knowledge of how they operate, where they will go, what dangers lie ahead, whether the ship will return to dock in Earth's solar system within the span of a human lifetime, or where the mysterious Heechee have gone.
Through it all, Broadhead must wrestle with his own insecurities and guilt, overcome his fear of space, and come to grips with his relationship with the only woman he has ever loved. He must also share his murderous secret with a computerized Sigmund Freud and erase the mental shield's he's raised against a memory made a million light years away....
While it is surely "hard" science fiction, "Gateway" also takes considerable pains to pull the blankets off the truth about humans deal with issues rapidly developing in human culture. Pohl is a visionary on the scale of Jules Vern for recognizing and addressing many of the issues that will plague our future, and are already becoming evident -- rampant hunger, global overcrowding, a widening gap between the rich and the poor, the erosion of traditional Judeo-Christian values, a new scheme for romantic relationships and sexual morals, and the earnest need to seek a manifest destiny as Man stretches away from its terrestrial confines.
Pohl is not just a master of his genre, he is in large part responsible for the field of science fiction as it is known today.
He was editor of Galaxy magazine for 10 years, from 1959 to 1969, as well as sister publication If. His work earned several Hugo and Nebula awards, including one each for Gateway, and in 1993 he was named a Nebula Grand Master.

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