En las profundidades de una casi sólida esfera de energía, llamada el Kugelblitz, inmediatamente fuera del halo de la Vía Láctea, se hallaban los potenciales destructores del Universo.
Los humanos los llamaban el Enemigo. Los Heechees los llamaban los Asesinos. Ninguna criatura que los hubiera visto había vivido lo suficiente para contarlo. Pero las antiguas ruinas dispersas por toda la Galaxia, y los esparcidos restos de razas como los Perezosos y los Cerdos Vudú, mostraban pruebas del poder devastador del Enemigo ... y de su fría determinación de destruir toda vida inteligente. Ahora, desde hacía eones, el Enemigo había permanecido estratégicamente silencioso, pero la historia galáctica dejaba bien claro que podían golpear de nuevo en cualquier momento. Así que Heechees y humanos se habían unido en una vigilancia constante en los alrededores del Kugelblitz.

I read the first books of this series, and they were interesting, although it was starting to get slow at the end. But I wanted to finish the series while I still remembered the characters, so I kept going. Well, I almost regretted that decision.

The book really started to drag, mostly because of the repeated explanations of the difference between time for living people ("meat" people, they called them) and the electronically-stored versions, who interacted in milliseconds rather than seconds or minutes. Not to mention hearing over and over about the protagonist's psychological problems and his worries about everything.

My rating reflects the entire series, and is more of an average than a total rating, because I enjoyed the first parts. But if it were all one book, it might be lower. ( )

Chronologically, the last in the series. At last the Heechee and humanity meet the Assassins/Foe. As my memories of the previous installments were rather vague, it was difficult to follow at times until about half way through when there was a useful summary of events so far. It wrapped things up satisfactorily, though in a rather predictable way. ( )

What an execrable finale to the Heechee quartet.

The worst part of Pohl's Heechee series is that there's more than one book. Gateway (1977) is one of the finest sci-fi novels of the 20th century, bristling with creativity the childish sense of wonder. Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (1980), Heechee Rendezvous, and Annals of the Heechee (1987), on the other hand, utterly fail to live up to the original novel; they fail to even understand what made Gateway so dang good in the first place, making me hate them all the more, and hate that I felt obligated to push through the continuing, bland, repetitive, illogical adventures of Robinette Broadhead, S. Ya, and the obnoxious AI pal, Albert.

They nearly ruin the original Hugo- and Nebula-winning masterpiece, and this fourth, closing adventure is the worst of them.

Annals of the Heechee has an unusual structure: It's once again from the perspective of Robin, the anti-hero bum-slash-billionaire of the earlier books, who's long-dead and living as an AI construct inside future computers. He loves to talk about this fact, and spends pages upon pages repeating how being an AI is far better than being a 'meat' person. His digressive arguments and debates with his long-time AI pal, Albert Einstein, are excruciating boring, adding nothing at all to the plot -- and yet the naive philosophizing on the natures of the universe from these two make up the bulk of the book. Between these pages-long rants, we get a few adventures following a rag-tag group of outsider kids (including a Heechee child), and their story is the singular highlight. They feel real, and if the whole story followed them, there could have been another great novel here -- but it doesn't, and their story is a fraction of the pagecount, and it ends abruptly and unsatisfyingly with a deus ex machina before we revert focus back to the cyberspace of Robinette and Albert and the kids are never heard from again: Their story has no real resolution, they're simply dropped from the narrative once their story intersects with Robin.

Stick with Gateway and pretend the story ends there. It's a standalone adventure, with every positive perfectly holding its parabolic arc together. The three sequels drop the singularity of the original to form a new trilogy held together by obnoxious cliffhangers that push you to keep going; a trilogy that parts the curtains on every mystery Gateway won us over with. All the truths of the Heechee and the galaxy are played out in a really unsatisfying, overt way, leaving nothing to the imagination.

When I stumbled upon Gateway for the first time, I thought I had found myself a new best friend, a secret window into the real quality lurking in classic sci-fi -- the sort of sci-fi that should be dating itself by its 20th-century trappings and pseudoscience at this point -- but I was disappointed to see I was wrong, and the author barely seemed to understand his own work. Read Gateway. Now. But don't even think about picking up its sequels. ( )

In this final installment of the Heechee saga, humanity joins forces with the Heechee to finally deal with the Foe, a mysterious race of energy beings who want to eradicate all technological races and cause another big bang. However, like the previous book, this really only serves as the backdrop--the story is really about how society is dealing with large numbers of people becoming "stored intelligences" after they die (which is to say, they're not really dying), with multiple perspectives on how people live their new digital-only lives after their deaths (and occasionally before, in the case of "doppels"). It's an interesting exploration. Pohl does resolve the larger plot satisfactorily, but it's not really the focus anyway. ( )