Frederik Pohl’s the Annals of the Heechee (1987), or, How to Kill a Classic, Pt. 29

What an execrable finale to the Heechee quartet.

The worst part of Pohl’s Heechee series is that there’s more than one book. Gateway (1977) is one of the finest sci-fi novels of the 20th century, bristling with creativity the childish sense of wonder. Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (1980), Heechee Rendezvous, and Annals of the Heechee (1987), on the other hand, utterly fail to live up to the original novel; they fail to even understand what made Gateway so dang good in the first place, making me hate them all the more, and hate that I felt obligated to push through the continuing, bland, repetitive, illogical adventures of Robinette Broadhead, S. Ya, and their obnoxious AI, Albert Einstein.

The Hugo (& Nebula) Awards: Frederik Pohl’s Gateway (1977)

Rockets soaring across the sky, lasers blasting indiscriminately, aliens with names like Ubuntu and Fnord, humanoid robots with joints going kzzt!-bzzt!: The Golden Age of Sci-Fi has aged itself into the ground by 2017, its future technology nothing more than magic with a metallic sheen, its important social messages sexist diatribes or naive Libertarian fantasies.