Heechee
Encyclopedia
The Heechee are a fictional alien race from the science fiction
works of Frederik Pohl
. The Heechee are portrayed as an exceedingly advanced star-travelling race that explored Earth's solar system millennia ago and then disappeared without a trace before humankind began space exploration.
The Heechee first appeared in "The Merchants of Venus
" (1972), a novella in the collection The Gold at the Starbow's End, sometimes called "The Merchants of Venus Underground". They also are referenced or appear in many of Pohl's novels and short stories published between 1977 and 2004.
Pohl's novels featuring the Heechee are:
Pohl has also released a collection of short stories in the series:
to be. In "The Merchants of Venus", the Heechee (a name given by humans since nobody knows what they called themselves) are nowhere to be found, and humans know of them only from their artifacts. The first evidence came with the discovery of tunnels constructed under Venusian surface, each tunnel distinguished by the mysterious cobalt blue
metal covering the interior sections.
The tunnels facilitate colonization, since they can be adapted to human use at a fraction of what it would cost to dig them from scratch, and they and the other artifacts attract scientists who want to study them; then adventurers and prospectors who hope to make money by discovering more artifacts; and finally tourists rich enough to travel to Venus and see all this. By the next parts of the series, enough people have come to Venus to make it a sovereign state and a major power.
In the main part of the series, the frontier has moved away from Venus after explorers discovered an asteroid orbiting perpendicular
to the ecliptic plane
, filled with cobalt blue tunnels, and hundreds of small Heechee spaceships. The asteroid, named Gateway by the discoverers, is occupied by the powerful nations of the world, who subsequently form the Gateway Corporation to administer the object.
By happenstance, one of the asteroid explorers enters a ship and hits a button, activating the vehicle and sending him on a thirty-day journey to another solar system. Upon his return, the Gateway Corporation decides to allow explorers (called Prospectors) to take trips on the mostly still-functioning ships. Prospectors who find valuable materials or make discoveries are rewarded with substantial bonuses. Ships on the asteroids come in three sizes and are defined as a "one", "three", or "five" based upon the number of passengers that they can (for the most part uncomfortably) carry. Not every vehicle returns and there are other great hazards to the explorers.
's event horizon
. In the sequel, Broadhead uses the money to fund further discoveries involving Heechee technology, locating a Heechee food factory that is capable of turning raw carbon
, hydrogen
, oxygen
and nitrogen
(CHON
) from comets into edible food for an overpopulated Earth.
The Heechee do not appear until book three in the series where the reason for their absence is explained. Some 500,000 years earlier, the Heechee were active in discovering the galaxy, including an Australopithecine
-inhabited Earth (where a sampling of the creatures were extracted and left to propagate to modern time on a Heechee station). The Heechee found out that there was a race of pure energy called simply The Foe (or alternatively called either The Assassins or The Kugel) wiping out civilizations on any planet where they emerged. The inherently cautious Heechee retreated to the interior of the black hole in the Galactic Core hoping to avoid being destroyed. Due to time dilation
, only a few hundred years have passed in the interior of the black hole since the Heechee left the universe. After going into hiding, Heechee scout ships are periodically sent outside the black hole to check on developments through the universe in general and the emerging Earth in particular.
When the latest Heechee crew exits the black hole, they are shocked to discover that humans are flying Heechee spaceships to all parts of the galaxy—and one of those places happens to be the Kugelblitz
(a black hole
made of energy and not matter), where The Foe was concentrated. The Heechee expected humans to discover the ships, but the cautious race believed Earth people would study and unlock the ships' secrets over a period of hundreds of years—and not simply take the equipment out for random rides in the dangerous galaxy.
When the Heechee finally arrive in force, it's decided that the human intrusion cannot be reversed and The Foe must be confronted.
The Heechee have collected evidence that The Foe have been adding matter into the universe. The Foe intend to tilt the balance and allow the Big Bang
to be reversed and the universe to collapse into a Big Crunch
billions of years into the future. The Foe intend that once the universe rebounds into a second big bang, it will do so in the form of pure energy, removing the atomic matter that The Foe regard as so much clutter. A détente
is created between Broadhead and The Foe, allowing the aliens to continue their project and the human and Heechee growing to accept that they will eventually progress toward bodiless minds.
emitter in a storage pod between his or her legs. The pod is a trapezohedron
shaped device and is also used for carrying equipment. The pods also explain why the seats on the ship have V-shaped indentations to accommodate the devices. The Heechee's home planet evolved near a naturally occurring microwave source, making the background radiation a necessary requirement for an ambient environment; the extended absence of the radiation will cause illness and death.
Heechee relationships do not generally feature couple cohabitation for lengthy periods as with human marriages. A burrowing species, they tend to display more solitary conduct than humans. A Heechee bed is a cocoon, stuffed with soft bits of fabric. Heechees only breed when a female is in season.
Heechee are vegetarians and use a fibrous plant to clean their teeth. There are two Heechee languages: the language of Do and the language of Feel, with communications with humans restricted to the former.
Unlike humans, the Heechee did not develop artificial intelligence
. Instead, they relied upon technology to pour the brains of departed Heechee into data storage, giving them a limited immortality. These "stored minds" operate at exponentially faster speeds than "meat" brains. Those stored operate in their own social strata often separate from their organic counterparts. After centuries of existence, the various Heechee consciousnesses join the "massed minds", essentially dying while memories are distributed among other machine stored intelligences.
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
works of Frederik Pohl
Frederik Pohl
Frederik George Pohl, Jr. is an American science fiction writer, editor and fan, with a career spanning over seventy years — from his first published work, "Elegy to a Dead Planet: Luna" , to his most recent novel, All the Lives He Led .He won the National Book Award in 1980 for his novel Jem...
. The Heechee are portrayed as an exceedingly advanced star-travelling race that explored Earth's solar system millennia ago and then disappeared without a trace before humankind began space exploration.
The Heechee first appeared in "The Merchants of Venus
The Merchants of Venus
"The Merchants of Venus", also known by the title "The Merchants of Venus Underground", is a science fiction novella by American writer Frederik Pohl published in 1972 as part of the collection The Gold at the Starbow's End....
" (1972), a novella in the collection The Gold at the Starbow's End, sometimes called "The Merchants of Venus Underground". They also are referenced or appear in many of Pohl's novels and short stories published between 1977 and 2004.
Pohl's novels featuring the Heechee are:
- GatewayGateway (novel)Gateway is a 1977 science fiction novel by American writer Frederik Pohl. Gateway won the 1978 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the 1978 Locus Award for Best Novel, the 1977 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and the 1978 John W. Campbell Award. It is the opening novel in the Heechee saga...
(1977) - Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (1980)
- Heechee RendezvousHeechee RendezvousHeechee Rendezvous is a science fiction novel by American writer Frederik Pohl, a sequel of Gateway and Beyond the Blue Event Horizon. It takes place about two decades after the first novel. The novel was nominated for Locus Award in 1985....
(1984) - Annals of the Heechee (1987)
- The Boy Who Would Live Forever: A Novel of Gateway (2004)
Pohl has also released a collection of short stories in the series:
- The Gateway Trip (1990)
"The Merchants of Venus"
The Heechee in fact originated as a plot device enabling Pohl to give a plausible reason for humans to make the effort of colonizing the inhospitable planet that space probes have proven VenusVenus
Venus is the second planet from the Sun, orbiting it every 224.7 Earth days. The planet is named after Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty. After the Moon, it is the brightest natural object in the night sky, reaching an apparent magnitude of −4.6, bright enough to cast shadows...
to be. In "The Merchants of Venus", the Heechee (a name given by humans since nobody knows what they called themselves) are nowhere to be found, and humans know of them only from their artifacts. The first evidence came with the discovery of tunnels constructed under Venusian surface, each tunnel distinguished by the mysterious cobalt blue
Cobalt blue
Cobalt blue is a cool, slightly desaturated blue color, historically made using cobalt salts of alumina. It is used in certain ceramics and painting; the different cobalt pigment smalt, based on silica, is more often used directly in tinted transparent glasses...
metal covering the interior sections.
The tunnels facilitate colonization, since they can be adapted to human use at a fraction of what it would cost to dig them from scratch, and they and the other artifacts attract scientists who want to study them; then adventurers and prospectors who hope to make money by discovering more artifacts; and finally tourists rich enough to travel to Venus and see all this. By the next parts of the series, enough people have come to Venus to make it a sovereign state and a major power.
In the main part of the series, the frontier has moved away from Venus after explorers discovered an asteroid orbiting perpendicular
Perpendicular
In geometry, two lines or planes are considered perpendicular to each other if they form congruent adjacent angles . The term may be used as a noun or adjective...
to the ecliptic plane
Ecliptic
The ecliptic is the plane of the earth's orbit around the sun. In more accurate terms, it is the intersection of the celestial sphere with the ecliptic plane, which is the geometric plane containing the mean orbit of the Earth around the Sun...
, filled with cobalt blue tunnels, and hundreds of small Heechee spaceships. The asteroid, named Gateway by the discoverers, is occupied by the powerful nations of the world, who subsequently form the Gateway Corporation to administer the object.
By happenstance, one of the asteroid explorers enters a ship and hits a button, activating the vehicle and sending him on a thirty-day journey to another solar system. Upon his return, the Gateway Corporation decides to allow explorers (called Prospectors) to take trips on the mostly still-functioning ships. Prospectors who find valuable materials or make discoveries are rewarded with substantial bonuses. Ships on the asteroids come in three sizes and are defined as a "one", "three", or "five" based upon the number of passengers that they can (for the most part uncomfortably) carry. Not every vehicle returns and there are other great hazards to the explorers.
Gateway
The Gateway novel focuses on the exploits of one of those explorers, Robinette Broadhead. Broadhead hits the jackpot by becoming the first person to return from a black holeBlack hole
A black hole is a region of spacetime from which nothing, not even light, can escape. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass will deform spacetime to form a black hole. Around a black hole there is a mathematically defined surface called an event horizon that...
's event horizon
Event horizon
In general relativity, an event horizon is a boundary in spacetime beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer. In layman's terms it is defined as "the point of no return" i.e. the point at which the gravitational pull becomes so great as to make escape impossible. The most common case...
. In the sequel, Broadhead uses the money to fund further discoveries involving Heechee technology, locating a Heechee food factory that is capable of turning raw carbon
Carbon
Carbon is the chemical element with symbol C and atomic number 6. As a member of group 14 on the periodic table, it is nonmetallic and tetravalent—making four electrons available to form covalent chemical bonds...
, hydrogen
Hydrogen
Hydrogen is the chemical element with atomic number 1. It is represented by the symbol H. With an average atomic weight of , hydrogen is the lightest and most abundant chemical element, constituting roughly 75% of the Universe's chemical elemental mass. Stars in the main sequence are mainly...
, oxygen
Oxygen
Oxygen is the element with atomic number 8 and represented by the symbol O. Its name derives from the Greek roots ὀξύς and -γενής , because at the time of naming, it was mistakenly thought that all acids required oxygen in their composition...
and nitrogen
Nitrogen
Nitrogen is a chemical element that has the symbol N, atomic number of 7 and atomic mass 14.00674 u. Elemental nitrogen is a colorless, odorless, tasteless, and mostly inert diatomic gas at standard conditions, constituting 78.08% by volume of Earth's atmosphere...
(CHON
CHON
CHON is an mnemonic acronym for the four most common elements in living organisms: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen....
) from comets into edible food for an overpopulated Earth.
The Heechee do not appear until book three in the series where the reason for their absence is explained. Some 500,000 years earlier, the Heechee were active in discovering the galaxy, including an Australopithecine
Australopithecine
The term australopithecine refers generally to any species in the related genera Australopithecus or Paranthropus. These species occurred in the Plio-Pleistocene era, and were bipedal and dentally similar to humans, but with a brain size not much larger than modern apes, lacking the...
-inhabited Earth (where a sampling of the creatures were extracted and left to propagate to modern time on a Heechee station). The Heechee found out that there was a race of pure energy called simply The Foe (or alternatively called either The Assassins or The Kugel) wiping out civilizations on any planet where they emerged. The inherently cautious Heechee retreated to the interior of the black hole in the Galactic Core hoping to avoid being destroyed. Due to time dilation
Time dilation
In the theory of relativity, time dilation is an observed difference of elapsed time between two events as measured by observers either moving relative to each other or differently situated from gravitational masses. An accurate clock at rest with respect to one observer may be measured to tick at...
, only a few hundred years have passed in the interior of the black hole since the Heechee left the universe. After going into hiding, Heechee scout ships are periodically sent outside the black hole to check on developments through the universe in general and the emerging Earth in particular.
When the latest Heechee crew exits the black hole, they are shocked to discover that humans are flying Heechee spaceships to all parts of the galaxy—and one of those places happens to be the Kugelblitz
Kugelblitz (astrophysics)
In theoretical physics, a kugelblitz is a concentration of light so intense that it forms an event horizon and becomes self-trapped: according to general relativity, if we aim enough radiation into a region, the concentration of energy can warp spacetime enough for the region to become a black...
(a black hole
Black holes in fiction
The study of black holes, bodies so massive that even light cannot escape, goes back to the late 18th century, though the term 'black hole' was only coined in 1967...
made of energy and not matter), where The Foe was concentrated. The Heechee expected humans to discover the ships, but the cautious race believed Earth people would study and unlock the ships' secrets over a period of hundreds of years—and not simply take the equipment out for random rides in the dangerous galaxy.
When the Heechee finally arrive in force, it's decided that the human intrusion cannot be reversed and The Foe must be confronted.
The Heechee have collected evidence that The Foe have been adding matter into the universe. The Foe intend to tilt the balance and allow the Big Bang
Big Bang
The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological model that explains the early development of the Universe. According to the Big Bang theory, the Universe was once in an extremely hot and dense state which expanded rapidly. This rapid expansion caused the young Universe to cool and resulted in...
to be reversed and the universe to collapse into a Big Crunch
Big Crunch
In physical cosmology, the Big Crunch is one possible scenario for the ultimate fate of the universe, in which the metric expansion of space eventually reverses and the universe recollapses, ultimately ending as a black hole singularity.- Overview :...
billions of years into the future. The Foe intend that once the universe rebounds into a second big bang, it will do so in the form of pure energy, removing the atomic matter that The Foe regard as so much clutter. A détente
Détente
Détente is the easing of strained relations, especially in a political situation. The term is often used in reference to the general easing of relations between the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1970s, a thawing at a period roughly in the middle of the Cold War...
is created between Broadhead and The Foe, allowing the aliens to continue their project and the human and Heechee growing to accept that they will eventually progress toward bodiless minds.
Physical and Cultural Attributes
The Heechee's appearance is described as smaller than humans, bow-legged with skeletal frames, and possessed of dark, plastic-smooth skin with patches and curlicues of bright gold and scarlet. Each Heechee carries a microwaveMicrowave
Microwaves, a subset of radio waves, have wavelengths ranging from as long as one meter to as short as one millimeter, or equivalently, with frequencies between 300 MHz and 300 GHz. This broad definition includes both UHF and EHF , and various sources use different boundaries...
emitter in a storage pod between his or her legs. The pod is a trapezohedron
Trapezohedron
The n-gonal trapezohedron, antidipyramid or deltohedron is the dual polyhedron of an n-gonal antiprism. Its 2n faces are congruent kites . The faces are symmetrically staggered.The n-gon part of the name does not reference the faces here but arrangement of vertices around an axis of symmetry...
shaped device and is also used for carrying equipment. The pods also explain why the seats on the ship have V-shaped indentations to accommodate the devices. The Heechee's home planet evolved near a naturally occurring microwave source, making the background radiation a necessary requirement for an ambient environment; the extended absence of the radiation will cause illness and death.
Heechee relationships do not generally feature couple cohabitation for lengthy periods as with human marriages. A burrowing species, they tend to display more solitary conduct than humans. A Heechee bed is a cocoon, stuffed with soft bits of fabric. Heechees only breed when a female is in season.
Heechee are vegetarians and use a fibrous plant to clean their teeth. There are two Heechee languages: the language of Do and the language of Feel, with communications with humans restricted to the former.
Unlike humans, the Heechee did not develop artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
. Instead, they relied upon technology to pour the brains of departed Heechee into data storage, giving them a limited immortality. These "stored minds" operate at exponentially faster speeds than "meat" brains. Those stored operate in their own social strata often separate from their organic counterparts. After centuries of existence, the various Heechee consciousnesses join the "massed minds", essentially dying while memories are distributed among other machine stored intelligences.
Heechee Devices
In addition to the Food Factory, the Heechee created a number of devices that the Earth people discovered and used, including:- Piezoelectric devices (allowing voltage to be generated from placing pressure on crystals).
- "Prayer fans" that appear and unfold like traditional fansFan (implement)A hand-held fan is an implement used to induce an airflow for the purpose of cooling or refreshing oneself. Any broad, flat surface waved back-and-forth will create a small airflow and therefore can be considered a rudimentary fan...
but are actually computer-related equipment containing the minds of dead Heechees and, later, dead humans. The fans also are used for data storage. - Faster-than-lightFaster-than-lightFaster-than-light communications and travel refer to the propagation of information or matter faster than the speed of light....
spaceshipStarshipA starship or interstellar spacecraft is a theoretical spacecraft designed for traveling between the stars, as opposed to a vehicle designed for orbital spaceflight or interplanetary travel....
s that act by nullifying the massMassMass can be defined as a quantitive measure of the resistance an object has to change in its velocity.In physics, mass commonly refers to any of the following three properties of matter, which have been shown experimentally to be equivalent:...
of the ship and avoiding the implication of EinsteinAlbert EinsteinAlbert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics and one of the most prolific intellects in human history...
's Relativity TheoryTheory of relativityThe theory of relativity, or simply relativity, encompasses two theories of Albert Einstein: special relativity and general relativity. However, the word relativity is sometimes used in reference to Galilean invariance....
that states that an object becomes more massive as it approaches the speed of light. - A Disruptor of Order in Aligned Systems is the device that allows Heechee to unseal the SchwarzschildSchwarzschild radiusThe Schwarzschild radius is the distance from the center of an object such that, if all the mass of the object were compressed within that sphere, the escape speed from the surface would equal the speed of light...
barrier in black holes and let ships to traverse the boundaries (referred to jokingly by humans as a "can opener"). - The "Dream Couch" or, more properly, a telepathic psychokinetic transceiver, is capable of receiving and transmitting thoughts across long distances. Heechees focus their law enforcement efforts on catching criminals while they are having perverse thoughts. In the novels, terrorists are depicted as putting insane people in Dream Couches and broadcast their thoughts into populated areas, causing widespread damage and destruction. Before learning of the Dream Couch being the cause, this was known on Earth as the "130-day fever", a period of planet-wide temporary insanity occurring roughly every one hundred and thirty days.
External links
- Review of Frederik Pohl's Gateway game
- Review of Gateway II game
- Heechee Saga at Worlds Without End