Back in December I started the Heechee saga with Gateway, one of the best science fiction novels I've read in a long time. The series continues with Beyond the Blue Event Horizon. The wild west days of space travel are over and things have settled down to a more controlled methodology. No one still knows who the Heechee were (or even if they still exist) but even that mystery seems possible to solve now. Robinette Broadhead the depressed ex-prospector is now wealthy and owns most (all?) of the space exploration interests. He is now married but still haunted by the tragic events that made him his fortune. Mostly though, Broadhead is a secondary character. The novel focuses around a family of explorers more akin to Swiss Family Robinson or more recently Lost in Space. Their journey out to the CHON Food Factory in the Oort Cloud was interesting and almost as entertaining as the prospecting in Gateway. Unfortunately they have to run into Wan, a wild child of outer space who ends up dominating much of the plot of Beyond the Blue Event Horizon and Heechee Rendezvous. Wan is one of the major detractors in the novel. He has about as much appeal as Wesley Crusher in Next Gen. combined with the temper and sex drive of a Vulcan going through Pon Far. I spent much of the book wishing evil things at Wan. Despite Wan running amok in the novel, there is still the fascinating world building and imagined technology of Gateway. This time it's combined with long lectures on cosmology which are interesting but basically filler. If you don't want to sit through the long discussions of how the universe works you can read up on the basics in The Whole Shebang first.