Gateway

I've been traveling frequently in the past few weeks, during which I've been rereading Frederik Pohl's Gateway novels. I very much enjoy these books, as much for the hard science (cosmology) as for the humour (eg "When I was a child, there was a 128 page book sold called "Things we known about the Heechee. All the pages in the book were blank"). 

Today, I came across this statement on a discussion list:

... some things that look like sci-fi are really fantasy. The latter Star Wars movies (episodes 1-3) are like this: their focus on midi-chlorians is no different from a wizard with magic dust. Frederik Pohl's Gateway novels are similar: the blind use of alien artifacts is no different from Bilbo Baggins finding that the ring makes him invisible. This is why the setting for so many fantasy stories is a decaying, once-great society: in ages past the people understood their creation, but the knowledge has been lost.

I beg to differ as regarding Gateway: it's true that the humans initially use the Heechee artifacts without understanding how they work, but they constantly try (during the first two books) to understand how those artifacts do work. Of course, once they find out how the artifacts work, new and surprising uses are found for those artifacts, uses which the Heechee never dreamed of. So this is fantasy?

I own a copy of Pohl's autobiography, "The way the future was", which contains all manner of interesting material. I paraphrase Pohl in writing that every experience is grist to the writer's mill: there's a paragraph about Pohl learning to play the guitar, which seems to be a dead end until one reads the first Gateway book in which Robin Broadhead thinks about an upcoming guitar lesson and how one makes the transition between D7 and C.