Running Through Hugo's Back Yard 6: Gateway

Hugo winner: Gateway by Frederik Pohl, 1978

My view: I once made a statement on Facebook (go ahead and shudder freely at that fact, if you  wish) that veteran authors who successfully avoid Old Fogeyism - a tendency for writers to get cranky and start shouting "you damn kids get off of my lawn!" at new-fangled concepts that they don't like - is central to their continued relevance as authors even if they're pushing Who Knows What in terms of their actual chronological age.

Frederik Pohl is definitely one of those writers.

A Pohl work from the seventies is just as relevant to SF as a Pohl work from any other decade, and this story is no exception. Despite all of the futuristic trappings of the novel, Robinette Broadhead is exactly the sort of Everyman who'd be relevant regardless of whether or not he'd be alive during the Great Depression, the Civil Rights Era or Pohl's setting here. His neurotic quirks, desperation to make a better life for himself and the pain of losing a loved one and his crewmates to the same space travel phenomena that enabled him to become a rich man can be told in many ways and in many settings, but it's far too universal a story to merely be considered stilted BEM-fodder.

Nuggety? Probably not. Broadhead may be determined, grasping and capable of taking all sorts of crazy-ass risks in order to improve his meager lot in life, but he's no steely-eyed, iron-jawed alien-slaying type. Matter of fact, he's glaringly neurotic and emotionally vulnerable to his core. If what Brad Torgersen says is his idea of real SF is to be believed (my guess is that it's a huge mistake if you do), this doesn't qualify as real SF either - which is an entirely laughable view, IMHO.