Heechee

Heechee

First edition of Gateway (1977), the first Heechee book and second Heechee story
Author	Frederik Pohl
Cover artist	Boris Vallejo
Country	United States
Series	Heechee; The Heechee Saga
Genre	Science fiction

The Heechee are a fictional alien race from the science fiction works of Frederik Pohl. The Heechee are portrayed as an exceedingly advanced star-traveling race that explored the Milky Way Galaxy including Earth's solar system hundreds of millennia ago and disappeared before the evolution of genus Homo.

Pohl introduced the Heechee in a 1972 novella, "The Merchants of Venus" (sometimes called "The Merchants of Venus Underground"). In 1990, it was packaged with nine original short stories as The Gateway Trip (Del Rey Books), a book of about 240 pages that is the only collection in the Heechee series.

Five novels published from 1977 to 2004 also feature the Heechee.

Collectively the Heechee stories have been considered a series called "The Heechee Saga" or Heechee Saga or simply Heechee. A German-language edition of the first three novels was published 20 years later as "The Gateway Trilogy": Die Gateway-Trilogie (Munich: Heyne Verlag, 2004). Book 4 was sometimes promoted as "the ultimate book in the renowned Heechee Saga". Book 6, the fifth novel, incorporated three previously published stories.

The first novel was serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction beginning November 1976, illustrated by Vincent DiFate. The third was serialized in Amazing Science Fiction from January 1984, illustrated by Jack Gaughan.

The new stories packaged with "The Merchants of Venus" as The Gateway Trip: Tales and Vignettes were all published in the first three 1990 issues of Aboriginal Science Fiction; both the serial and the late 1990 book were illustrated by Frank Kelly Freas.

The original Heechee novella was published in the July–August 1972 issue of Worlds of If – or If, a magazine Pohl had edited from 1961 to 1969 – and almost simultaneously in The Gold at the Starbow's End (Ballantine Books, 1972), a collection of short fiction by Pohl. In 1990 it was included in an all-Heechee collection, The Gateway Trip: Tales and vignettes of the Heechee, comprising the novella and nine new short stories. The 1972 magazine story was illustrated by Jack Gaughan and the 1990 collection by Frank Kelly Freas.