Heechee

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.

Series

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.