"Annals of the Heechee" by Frederik Pohl

This is the fourth (and final?) installation of the Heechee saga, and by far the most mind-numbingly boring! I have no idea how and why I finished this book. I guess I wanted to learn more about the Heechee and 'The Foe' or 'The Assassins' but on a second thought I should have stopped at book 2.

90% of the book happens in the virtual reality of the memory banks of the 'gigabit space' and most of the protagonists are 'stored personalities' - digital equivalents of memories and consciousness of dead people, and their silly life which looks (and feels, apparently) as the outside world, with parties, drinks, sex, etc. etc. Ridiculous!

Much of the rest of the book is spent in conversations between the stored Robinnette Broadhead and his data retrieval system, Albert Einstein, who teaches him junior-college level science, and various other 'stored' personalities. The Heechees now live among the people and the Heechee kids go to school with human kids and even fall in love. There are a couple of old terrorists, one of them child molester who has his paws on a fragile Japanese 10 year old girl, and they get appropriately killed with knives in their throats/hearts.

At the end, the Heechee/Human alliance attacks the foe, but get a slap on the wrist instead and the big revelation that we all will one day become energy-based non-corporal consciousness like 'The Foe'.

That's it. That was the entire 400+ pages book. What a horrendous waste of time!