Frederik Pohl

They were two lovely choices. One of them meant giving up every chance of a decent life forever...and the other one scared me out of my mind.

On this day I want to tell you about, which will be about a thousand years from now, there were a boy, a girl and a love story.

That's really what SF is all about, you know: the big reality that pervades the real world we live in: the reality of change. Science fiction is the very literature of change. In fact, it is the only such literature we have.

Wealth ... or death. Those were the choices Gateway offered. Humans had discovered this artificial spaceport, full of working interstellar ships left behind by the mysterious, vanished Heechee. Their destinations are preprogrammed. They are easy to operate, but impossible to control. Some came back with discoveries which made their intrepid pilots rich; others returned with their remains
barely identifiable. It was the ultimate game of Russian roulette, but in this resource-starved future there was no shortage of desperate.

You can't trust reason. We threw it out of the ad profession long ago and have never missed it.

What were we doing here? Traveling hundreds or thousands of light-years, to break our hearts?