The protagonist is Robinette Broadhead, we meet him in a therapy session and the novel flicks between his therapy sessions in the present and his life to date. The novel artfully reveals the source of Robinette's trauma. It uses the same mechanic as Atwood's Oryx and Crake but Gateway is much more organic. We learn of Robinette's time on Gateway, a space station built by the Hechee, another much more advanced and long since disappeared life form. Humans have found the station and ships programmed for unknown destinations. Most people on Earth are poverty stricken and looking for ways to improve their lot. One of the ways they can do this is to go to Gateway and man the ships for unknown destinations, hoping firstly that they return and hoping to find other Hechee artifacts for which they will be paid well. It is a long drawn out game of russian roulette.
The novel is interspersed with posters, personal columns and bulletins from Gateway, efficiently offering insights and background to the atmosphere of the place and the lives of those in it. It was a pleasure to read, made more so by the fact Robinette isn't a perfect leading man, he is flawed and sometimes unlikeable.
