Gateway by Frederick Pohl

I've just finished Gateway by Frederik Pohl (winner of the 1977 Nebula award and the 1978 Hugo and Campbell awards). And my thoughts about it are mixed - yes, it was an excellent novel. Probably even deserving of all those awards (but I haven't read much else from that year). But to me it also seemed like a missed opportunity - it was so nearly a masterpiece, but in the end didn't quite achieve it. The pacing was a little erratic - too slow at the beginning, too fast at the end. The main characters were also very interesting - Bob, Klara and Sigfrid the computer were all great characters, and even some of the supporting characters were pretty well developed for a relatively short novel. But there were minor flaws - while he was great at creating characters, he didn't quite manage to convey a great atmosphere. Gateway is a great concept - that of an alien space station filled with their ancient, working ships, which can go anywhere in the universe, many of which come to ancient ruins of theirs, a huge gamble - but it's left at that. There are almost no more revelations, and when a damaged ship was brought in, it didn't feel as terrible as it should. Bob's fear was entirely believable - but it didn't translate to me in the same way that Mandella's did in The Forever War. Gateway also seemed to be a novel which can't quite tell if it's trying to be hard SF or soft SF - a lot of the Gateway scenes were often filled with scientific ideas as to how this might work and why, and it also had that hard SF trait of keeping the action quite limited - but on the whole it's very difficult to describe it as hard SF. Gateway certainly isn't a bad novel - it's an excellent novel in fact - but it's just shy of being a masterpiece and I think it could have been, but I'm not entirely sure how. I think ultimately I'd give it a 8 out of 10.