Conference noted::sf

    I didn't bother to finish it.  I took it back to the library as
    it took me three weeks to get a little more than halfway through.
    
    Books I like I can usually read in two or three evenings.
   
    	Frank

    I guess Pohl has an impossible problem: what do you do after you've
    written not only the best book of your career, but one of the best
    SF books ever ("Gateway")? In creating a series of Heechee books,
    Pohl did the understandable, but doomed to be disappointing, thing.
    The Heechee were much more exciting as unexplained entities.
    
    
    KBS
    

    I didn't like "Annals..." as much as I did the first three books.
    Pohl got a little too "cutsie" with his main character, and he
    tended to ramble through the story to the point where I nearly
    put the book down without finishing it.  I like some of his ideas
    about life in "gigabit space" though, and I still found the Heechee
    to be delightful, especially a young one trying to fit in with
    human children.
    
    Overall, I'd say it's worth reading but is a little disappointing
    by comparison with it's predecessors.
    
    ... Bob
    

    I thought "Gateway" was an instant classic, the second book a slight
    come-down, the third a bit more of a come-down, and "Annals" very
    disappointing. Everything was too neatly resolved. In "Gateway",
    the sidebars added tremendously to the background and the pacing.
    In "Annals", with its dual time tracks ("meat" time vs. "gigabit
    space" time), there was nothing to perform a similar function.
    
    While I only finished it at DECWorld, I had to go back to review
    the very end. Either my brain is going fast, or it really wasn't
    all that memorable.
   
    Richard

    RE: last
    
    I couldn't agree with you more.
    
    -Steve

    by Frederick Pohl
    Del Rey SF, hardcover edition March '87, paperback May '88
    
    The fourth and slowest book of the Heechee Saga.  Pohl's nebbish 
    hero, Robinette Broadhead, is now dead.  Fortunately, his immense 
    wealth and Heechee technology have been able to preserve his
    soul as a computer program.  He lives in a simulated world, and 
    even has a simulation of his simulated science advisor, Albert 
    Einstein.   He goes to cocktail parties with other simacrula, and 
    doesn't even like to deal with meat people any more, since 
    they live so slowly by comparison.
    
    Meanwhile, a watch station has been set up outside the kugelblitz
    (a black hole made of energy instead of matter) to watch for 
    the emergence of the Assasins, energy beings who wish to return 
    the universe to a state close to the Big Bang.  It's manned 
    jointly by telepathic Heechee and humans.  The Assasins are 
    obviously far more powerful than even the Heechee, and they have 
    destroyed civilizations before, so the watch station can only 
    hope to get some kind of warning off before being obliterated.
    The story follows some Heechee and human children on the watch 
    station when the first signs of activity occur, and follows 
    Broadhead as well.
    
    The first Heechee Saga book, "Gateway" was interesting, and the second,
    "Beyond the Blue Event Horizon" was excellent.  But this is now 
    the fourth book about Robinette Broadhead, and he is, well, a dork.  He
    whines a lot, and seems to need everything explained to him.  
    Much of this book seems to be occupied by his whining, and I 
    confess that I skipped ahead when nothing had happened by page 120.
    
    The theme of the book seems to be what a wonderful life a 
    simacrulum would lead, but this seems to me to be a bogus idea.  Let 
    me flame on this for a bit because it seems to be coming up in 
    more and more novels ("True Names", for one).  In a simulated 
    world anything is possible.  You can live forever, in any 
    environment, with no fear of injury or death.  You can experience 
    any adventure, any level of sensory pleasure, any kind of romance
    or excitement.  Heaven!  There are only a couple of drawbacks.

    One is that someone has to pay for all your hardware.  You no longer
    have anything to contribute.  Any particular skills or experience 
    that you used to have can be separated from your main program and 
    run independently.  If they can pour your consciousness into a 
    program, then presumably they can split off any part of you 
    that's economically valuable.
    
    That's one example of a deeper problem.  If all you are is bits,
    then where is the you?  You feel yourself as being conscious, and
    can remember having a history, but how do you know it's really
    yours? If your environment can be simulated, so can your memories.
    Of course, that could be our situation today; we could all be
    processes on God's 8800.  But we seem to be localized in time and
    space.  In a computer simacrulum you might not even be the main
    copy of your code - there could be hundreds of you around.  You
    could be stopped and started, copied to other systems, or merged with
    other simacrula, and you would never know it.  There's nothing 
    that's uniquely you anymore.  Now, some mystics long to merge 
    with the Oversoul, and this might be just as good.  As for 
    myself, if there's no longer a me then that looks a lot like death.
    
    One last thing.  The human world is vastly simpler than the real 
    world.  All that we create or know are pale shadows  of 
    what's out there.  Imagine being trapped in a library forever.  
    You could see pictures of flowers but never touch the real thing.
    You could write commentaries on the books there, but not add 
    anything new to them.  Heaven?  Probably not.
    
    /jlr

    With all the 'computer people' at DEC, I'm surprised that nobody's
    complained about how cramped 'gigabit space' is.  I mean, gee, 
    seems like robin should've bought an 8840 with 512 MB, he'd think
    its a palace.  Robins 'gigabit' space contained only 119+ MB per
    gigabit.  I know suspension of disbelief is a prereq for SF but,
    I still felt insulted everytime I read 'gigabit'.
    
    Scott.

    Re .7, I agree that gigabit space seemed rather constrained. If
    that were all I found fault with, it would have bothered me a lot
    more.
    
    - Richard

        Don't forget the parity and ecc bits...
        

    Somehow the 'gigabit' space didn't bother me nearly as much a
    Broadhead's continual insistance on being 'gloopy', deliberately
    ignoring important information his companions were trying to give
    him, and in general acting like a very childish spoiled brat.  I
    was continually reminded of Thomas Covenant....
    
    The other thing that bothered me was the way he played games with
    the time differential.  He seemed to talk about milliseconds somewhat
    the same way we talk about minutes, but it wasn't terribly consistant,
    and I could never get a good handle on how long things took.
    
    However, (maybe because I've been reading such dreck lately), I
    did stay up late a few nights reading it, and I'd give it about
    a 5 on the Willie Scale.
    
    Willie

    Well, I liked it -- but maybe because it put the series to bed.
    
    I think the constant reference to 'gigabit space' was not literally
    a gigabit, but like William Gibson's cyberspace: a consentual reality
    formed by a network of very large (by today's standards) computer
    systems / AI's.
    				- HBM

I made one try at reading this book but couldn't make much headway.  Given
the other responses in this string, maybe that's not surprising.

"Gateway" was very good.  "Beyond the Blue Event Horizon" was good but had
kind of a rushed feeling toward the end.  "Heechee Rendezvous" dawdled around
for a lot of the first half and then got rushed again toward the end.  "Annals
of the Heechee" started off seeming like it was going to dawdle a lot (i can
only guess that Fred was going to rush to tie everything up again at the end).

This was the same type of pattern i saw in Herbert's "Dune" novels (before i
gave up reading the sequels).  The first one was consistently good, the second
OK but started to show signs of stumbling around by the author, and the rest
just went downhill from there.  Maybe a marker of "creeping sequelitis".

								- paul