7.6 /10 1 Votes
Cover artist Darrell K. Sweet Publication date May 1984 Originally published May 1984 Followed by The Annals of the Heechee Genre Science Fiction | 3.8/5 Goodreads Country United States Media type Print (hardcover) Page count 311 (first ed.) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Series Heechee
The Heechee Saga
Gateway trilogy Publisher Del Rey Books/Ballantine Books Preceded by Beyond the Blue Event Horizon Similar Works by Frederik Pohl, Heechee books, Science Fiction books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Heechee Rendezvous is a science fiction novel by the American writer Frederik Pohl, published in 1984 by the Del Rey imprint of Ballantine Books. It is a sequel to Gateway (1977) and Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (1981), and is set about two decades after Gateway. It has been cataloged as the third book in a 6-book series called Heechee or The Heechee Saga but Kirkus reviewed it as completing a trilogy and a German-language edition of the three books was published as the Gateway trilogy (Die Gateway-Trilogie, Munich: Heyne Verlag, 2004) after all six were out.
Readers of Locus ranked Heechee Rendezvous third in the 1985 poll to confer the annual Locus Award for Best SF Novel.
Plot summary
Robinette Broadhead returns in this novel, a married millionaire with health problems. However, he does not feel that he deserves transplants to keep him alive, still feeling guilt about his experience on a horrible journey to a black hole, many years ago. He still attempts to research more about the Heechee and their technology. At the same time, a madman named Wan attempts to search for his father within black holes, using stolen equipment and a Heechee ship. His probing is caught by a sentient race of slow-moving creatures who inform a Heechee patrol, sent out of their black hole to observe the state of the galaxy. Fearing that humans may alert a malevolent race of beings known as the Assassins, the Heechee patrol sets out to try to find out more about human achievements in space flight and whether or not the damage done by them can be undone. Wan's probing also releases Gelle-Klara Moynlin, a companion of Robinette on his journey to the black hole, from her two decade long entrapment, which for Moylin was really only several elapsed days. The journeys of these past and future friends of Robinette begin to converge, and in the end, humans finally meet the Heechee.