The Heechee Saga - a.k.a. The Gateway Series - Frederik Pohl

Written by Frederik Pohl
Read by Oliver Wyman
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 128 Kbps
Unabridged

I am aware that there a multiple other copies of this on the site, but most are mp3 and 22,050Hz.

These are new encodes sourced from the new, full-fat 44,100Hz USAC codec.

I have re-encoded as chaptered AAC audiobooks for full compatibility with a target bitrate of 128kbps. Actual resultant bitrates came out lower.

The Heechee Saga, also known as the Gateway series, is a foundational science fiction series by Frederik Pohl. It explores humanity’s discovery and exploitation of advanced technology left behind by a vanished alien race called the Heechee.

The first novel, Gateway, is widely considered a masterpiece of the genre, winning the “triple crown” of sci-fi awards: the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards.

. . .

1977: Gateway

Gateway opened on all the wealth of the Universe…and on reaches of unimaginable horror…

When prospector Bob Broadhead went out to Gateway on the Heechee spacecraft, he decided he would know which was the right mission to make him his fortune.

Three missions later, now famous and permanently rich, Robinette Broadhead has to face what happened to him and what he is…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!

1980: Beyond the Blue Event Horizon

Frederik Pohl was on a streak when this Hugo Award-finalist novel was published in 1980. Now back in print after an absence of nearly a decade, this unique science fiction novel is as fresh and entertaining as ever.

The story begins when the hero of Gateway finances an expedition to a distant alien spaceship that may end famine forever.

On the ship, the explorers find a human boy, and evidence that reveals a powerful alien civilization is thriving on a transport ship headed right for Earth.

1984: Heechee Rendezvous

After millennia had passed, Mankind discovered the Heechee legacy (an alien culture that fled to the relative safety of a black hole) - in particular an asteroid stocked with autonavigating spacecraft.

Robinette Broadhead, who had led the expedition that unlocked the many secrets of Heechee technology, is now forced once more to make a perilous voyage into space - where the Heechee are waiting. And this time the future of Man is at stake…

1987: The Annals of the Heechee

Advanced Heechee technology had enabled Robinette Broadhead to live after death as a machine-stored personality, enjoying his life by flitting along the wires from party to party with a host of other machine-people.

But suddenly his decadent existence ends when an all-powerful alien race intent on the utter destruction of all intelligent life reappears after eons of silence, and threatens the lives of all heechee and humans.

Even Robin, virtually immortal and with unlimited access to millennia of accumulated data, cannot discover how to stop these aliens. It began to seem that only a face to face meeting could determine the future of the entire universe…

2004: The Boy Who Would Live Forever

In Gateway, long after the alien Heechee abandoned their space-station, Gateway (as humans dubbed it) allowed humans to explore new worlds. The Heechee, alarmed by the alien Kugel whose goal was to destroy all organic lifeforms, had already retreated to the galactic core, where they now lived in peace.

Now, in The Boy Who Would Live Forever, humans with dreams of life among the stars are joining the Heechee at the core, to live there along with those humans and Heechee whose physical bodies have died but have had their minds stored in electronic memory so that their wisdom passes down through the ages .

Their peace is threatened by the Kugel, who may yet attack the core. But a much greater threat is the human Wan Enrique Santos-Smith, whose blind loathing of the Heechee fuels an insane desire to destroy them and, incidentally, every living being in the galaxy.

Stan and Estrella, two young people from Earth, went to Gateway looking for adventure, and found each other. They settle among the Heechee on Forested Planet of Warm Old Star Twenty-Four, never suspecting that they may be the last best hope to save the galaxy.

But with allies like Gelle-Klara Moynlin (one of the galaxy’s richest women, who isn’t content to just have money, but wants to use her wealth for good) and machine mind Marc Antony (a wonderful chef to thousands of living and stored clients), they are destined to contend with Wan’s terrible plan.

Frederik Pohl has woven together the lives of these and other memorable characters to create a masterful new novel.