Gateway

Robinette Broadhead is a young food miner on an impoverished, overcrowded Earth until he wins a lottery and spends the prize on a one-way ticket to Gateway. The asteroid was hollowed out by the Heechee, a long-vanished alien race, and holds hundreds of abandoned starships that humans fly by trial and error. Each ship goes somewhere unpredictable, and a prospector who returns with a valuable discovery can become rich, while many never come back.

Broadhead is frightened and puts off his first missions, even as his money runs out. Years later he is wealthy and tormented by guilt, and he recounts what happened to an artificial-intelligence psychiatrist he calls Sigfrid von Shrink. The story alternates between his therapy sessions and his time on Gateway, interleaved with mission reports, contracts and other documents, and builds toward the trauma at its centre.

Published in 1977 as the first book of the Heechee Saga, Gateway won the Nebula, Hugo, Locus and John W. Campbell Memorial awards for best novel.