Name: Way Station
Rating: 3.869565217391304 (23 reviews)
ISBN: 9780020248712

Clifford D. Simak

The long talks Enoch Wallace, a Civil War veteran, enjoys with interstellar travelers may cease when war threatens the earth and his way station may be closed

Way Station

Sarah Sammis

James Paden

Fun. Different. That good, old 1965 sci-fiction style. Definitely a little rambly.

Bryan Alexander

I read this when I was a kid, and reread it this year because a low-cost ebook version crossed my screen.

Since I've spent almost two decades living in the woods, the novel now strikes me as enormously powerful and moving. I've been reading some out loud to my wife and fellow homesteader.

Way Station's core idea is that a man lives in a remote house, but the house is actually a disguised node in a galactic travel and communication network. Simak sets up quite a stage around this core idea, with a good range of characters and some world-building. It's a simple idea, really, and I can imagine (although I don't know if it happened this way) the author thinking it up during a wilderness hike. Maybe Simak saw a house that looked unusually well kept up, and daydreamed that it was more, much more than it appeared.

The plot concerns outsiders figuring out the house's real purpose, as well as challenges facing its occupant, the well named Enoch Wallace. I don't want to say much more because of spoilers, but also because it's not a novel of suspense and plot-driven mystery. It's a reflective book, spending most of its time with conversations or with solitary people thinking and working. 

A key theme is the power and beauty of the countryside, and this is a theme whose power has only grown since the novel appeared, as more and more of us have migrated away from rural areas, preferring instead suburban and urban domains. Simak uses Hemingway-ish prose to quietly sketch the beauties of woods and streams, cliffs and open night skies:He went down across the field and through the strip of woods and came out on the great outthrust of rock that stood atop the cliff that faced the river. (39) Two lovely scenes feature people giving others water to drink - one through "a cup fashioned of a strip of folded birch bark" (44) - as a sign of their character. There's an unvarnished argument about city folk learning from the country, learning enough to save the world, and that's one a 2018 reader might dislike. I'm reminded of Bradbury's love of the midwest. Rural science fiction is a thing.

A key plot point involves a local poor white family, including some awful men and an unusual woman. That ranges in tone from something like Steinbeck's naturalism to scenes of fantasy. It all worked well for me, but I don't know if people will charge Lucy Fisher (a fantastic name, a fisher of light) with being a manic pixie dreamgirl. The brief note about the Fishers occasionally proselytizing for "some obscure fundamentalist sect" (48) may better suit the modern reader.

Perhaps more resonant will be the narrator's identity as a (Civil War) veteran. Enoch was shaped powerfully by the experience of war, and Simak does a fine job of showing us the post-traumatic effects. There's a chapter (28) with a virtual hunting game (very prescient!) which doesn't do much for the plot, but works with that aspect of surviving war. That personal war experience leads to the novel's concern with humanity's evolution, an American science fiction chestnut. Will post-WWII humans stupidly destroy ourselves and/or aliens? (The Day the Earth Stood Still is 1951, just 13 years ahead of Way) 

Some reviewers will find this slow-moving, which astonishes me. The entire book is barely 200 pages, and manages to cram in a lot of ideas.

Ultimately the genre of the novel is a bit elusive. Yes, there's a science fiction frame and it's realized in some detail, with a plot point turning on alien math and multiple alien biologies to consider. But the fantasy elements are strong. Lucy appears as supernatural, thinly veiled by a glimpse of alien science. Enoch entertains literal ghosts from his past, similarly explained by a light touch of extraterrestrial super-science. Meanwhile, there are scenes drawing from horror, most impressively the first encounter between Enoch and Ulysses, his galactic handler.

One last note: I don't usually say this about stories, but there's a mythic aspect to the plot. A key development concerns proper burial rites, and while that connects nicely with contemporary (1960s) anthropological science fiction, the rituals and forms are vital on their own terms. There's a touch of Antigone in those Wisconsin woods.

I can be a cynical fiend who loves horror stories, but I am still moved by the novel's final optimism. Simak's handling of it reminds me a bit of the crucial scene in Watchmen when Dr. Manhattan is logically convinced that humans matter after all (and remember how the final image in that storyline is an honest smile?). Maybe I'm just a soppy Slav who cries too easily, but I love passages like this when they are set up as brilliantly as Simak does:The assurance would be there, he thought, the assurance that life had a special place in the great scheme of existence, that one, no matter how small, how feeble, how insignificant, still did count for something in the vast sweep of space and time. (81)
 Now I want to read the Simak I've missed and reread the ones I have. You should, too.

Michael Cowell

Enoch Wallace survived the carnage of Gettysburg and lived through the rest of the Civil War to make it home to his parents' farm in south-west Wisconsin. But his mother was already dead and his father soon joined her in the tiny family cemetery. It was then that Enoch met the being he called Ulysses and the farm became a way station for space travellers. Now, nearly a hundred years later, the US government is taking an interest in the seemingly immortal Enoch, and the Galactic Council, which set up the way station is threatening to tear itself apart.

Vladimir

Janice Hopper

Brian Edginton

Lizzy Grayson

Jan Jackson

Vera Sokolyanskaya

Steven O'Toole

Alex Jones

Mike Pearce

Zubaer

Dani

An ageless hermit runs a secret way station for alien visitors in the Wisconsin woods in this Hugo Award-winning science fiction classic Enoch Wallace is not like other humans. Living a secluded life in the backwoods of Wisconsin, he carries a nineteenth-century rifle and never seems to age--a fact that has recently caught the attention of prying government eyes. The truth is, Enoch is the last surviving veteran of the American Civil War and, for close to a century, he has operated a secret way station for aliens passing through on journeys to other stars. But the gifts of knowledge and immortality that his intergalactic guests have bestowed upon him are proving to be a nightmarish burden, for they have opened Enoch's eyes to humanity's impending destruction. Still, one final hope remains for the human race . . . though the cure could ultimately prove more terrible than the disease. Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel, Way Station is a magnificent example of the fine art of science fiction as practiced by a revered Grand Master. A cautionary tale that is at once ingenious, evocative, and compassionately human, it brilliantly supports the contention of the late, great Robert A. Heinlein that "to read science-fiction is to read Simak."

Way Station

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