Throwback Thursday: Way Station Is a Message of Hope from the Depths of the Cold War
Some books call you back again and again. You resist, because there are always new books clamoring for your time. Or you don’t, because sometimes the siren song is too strong. Clifford Simak’s Way Station is one of those books for me. The friable condition of my yellowed paperback (a copy so old, it only cost 60 cents brand new) is the chief obstacle to rereading it as often as I would like, so I was very happy to see that Open Road Media just reprinted this classic. I can’t imagine replacing my vintage paperback, but I snapped up the ebook version so I can read it again without fear of the pages crumbling in my hands.
Way Station
Paperback $18.99
Way Station
In Stock Online
Paperback $18.99
Way Station is a story of duty, friendship, despair, and, ultimately, hope. It illuminates the good and the bad in human nature. And, this being science fiction, it posits that these characteristics are shared with other intelligent life. It was initially published as a serial in Galaxy Magazine in 1963, the year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Cold War zeitgeist infuses the story, and might help explain why it won the Hugo Award for best novel in 1964.
The opening chapter is a short lyrical description of the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, probably the most horrific skirmish ever fought on American soil. The final image is Enoch Wallace standing with a shattered musket, his shoes caked with dust and blood, but alive. From there, the story jumps forward a century. Carl Lewis, a CIA agent, talks to a scientist about the many questions and few answers concerning Enoch Wallace, whose farm the agent has been covertly investigating. We learn that Enoch is a 124-year-old Civil War veteran who somehow still appears to be less than 30, and that his ancestral farm house in rural Wisconsin has an impenetrable coating that keeps anyone from entering or seeing inside, and that the family plot out back holds the remains of both Enoch’s parents and a strange body buried beneath a headstone covered with an indecipherable engraving.
The narrative then switches to Enoch’s perspective, and from his daily activities and a few flashbacks, we learn the answers to the agent’s questions: soon after he returned from the Civil War, Enoch was recruited by an alien to manage, in secret, a way station in the teleportation system that connects civilizations across the galaxy. The shell of his home now houses this rest stop on the intergalactic bypass. Enoch ages only when he leaves the structure for an hour or so each day for a walk through the rugged, rural southwestern Wisconsin landscape (the same region where Simak himself grew up). On these walks, which are described with feeling and detail, he, and we, meet his only human friends: Winston, who delivers his mail, and Lucy, a young, beautiful neighbor, who is deaf.
Simak imagines a variety of aliens passing through the way station, some humanoid, others far from it. In this last reread, as Wallace prepares a tank of liquid for the arrival of one of the latter variety, I was reminded of the scene from Men in Black in which Zed sends Agent Bee to meet and greet an alien and advises him to “take a sponge.” Simak’s aliens vary greatly socially and culturally as well, and the novel illuminates some of the difficulties in communicating different cultural and even scientific ideas across a cultural divide.
If you do not like your characters to muse philosophically, this is probably not a book for you. Enoch’s thoughtful nature was part of the reason Galactic Central recruited him, and living alone for almost a century has done nothing to mitigate it (not to mention the fact that he’s the only human experiencing contact with numerous alien races, which certainly could make one pensive). But Enoch’s contemplation of human nature, alien cultures, and other topics are part of the book’s attraction for me.
Armed with alien knowledge that he only partially understands, Enoch searches for a way to deliver Earth from an impeding nuclear armageddon. A vengeful neighbor, meddling government agents, and political machinations in what Enoch thought was a more enlightened galactic federation complicate his quest, and his rescue of Lucy from her abusive father and the theft of a priceless, powerful artifact threaten the future of the way station and even the stability of the galactic federation. But Simak was no pessimist: Enoch and his friends, human and alien, are able to resolve the crisis, and in the process show humanity has something to offer the galaxy. At a time when, in the real world, it seemed like our planet might not last out the decade, it was a poignant message of hope, and today, it has lost none of its power or immediacy.
In addition to Way Station and a number of other Clifford Simak classics, Open Road Media has reprinted a large number of science fiction and fantasy titles from other authors such as Robert Silverberg, Octavia Butler, Greg Bear, Bruce Sterling, and Poul Anderson.
Way Station is a story of duty, friendship, despair, and, ultimately, hope. It illuminates the good and the bad in human nature. And, this being science fiction, it posits that these characteristics are shared with other intelligent life. It was initially published as a serial in Galaxy Magazine in 1963, the year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Cold War zeitgeist infuses the story, and might help explain why it won the Hugo Award for best novel in 1964.
The opening chapter is a short lyrical description of the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, probably the most horrific skirmish ever fought on American soil. The final image is Enoch Wallace standing with a shattered musket, his shoes caked with dust and blood, but alive. From there, the story jumps forward a century. Carl Lewis, a CIA agent, talks to a scientist about the many questions and few answers concerning Enoch Wallace, whose farm the agent has been covertly investigating. We learn that Enoch is a 124-year-old Civil War veteran who somehow still appears to be less than 30, and that his ancestral farm house in rural Wisconsin has an impenetrable coating that keeps anyone from entering or seeing inside, and that the family plot out back holds the remains of both Enoch’s parents and a strange body buried beneath a headstone covered with an indecipherable engraving.
The narrative then switches to Enoch’s perspective, and from his daily activities and a few flashbacks, we learn the answers to the agent’s questions: soon after he returned from the Civil War, Enoch was recruited by an alien to manage, in secret, a way station in the teleportation system that connects civilizations across the galaxy. The shell of his home now houses this rest stop on the intergalactic bypass. Enoch ages only when he leaves the structure for an hour or so each day for a walk through the rugged, rural southwestern Wisconsin landscape (the same region where Simak himself grew up). On these walks, which are described with feeling and detail, he, and we, meet his only human friends: Winston, who delivers his mail, and Lucy, a young, beautiful neighbor, who is deaf.
Simak imagines a variety of aliens passing through the way station, some humanoid, others far from it. In this last reread, as Wallace prepares a tank of liquid for the arrival of one of the latter variety, I was reminded of the scene from Men in Black in which Zed sends Agent Bee to meet and greet an alien and advises him to “take a sponge.” Simak’s aliens vary greatly socially and culturally as well, and the novel illuminates some of the difficulties in communicating different cultural and even scientific ideas across a cultural divide.
If you do not like your characters to muse philosophically, this is probably not a book for you. Enoch’s thoughtful nature was part of the reason Galactic Central recruited him, and living alone for almost a century has done nothing to mitigate it (not to mention the fact that he’s the only human experiencing contact with numerous alien races, which certainly could make one pensive). But Enoch’s contemplation of human nature, alien cultures, and other topics are part of the book’s attraction for me.
Armed with alien knowledge that he only partially understands, Enoch searches for a way to deliver Earth from an impeding nuclear armageddon. A vengeful neighbor, meddling government agents, and political machinations in what Enoch thought was a more enlightened galactic federation complicate his quest, and his rescue of Lucy from her abusive father and the theft of a priceless, powerful artifact threaten the future of the way station and even the stability of the galactic federation. But Simak was no pessimist: Enoch and his friends, human and alien, are able to resolve the crisis, and in the process show humanity has something to offer the galaxy. At a time when, in the real world, it seemed like our planet might not last out the decade, it was a poignant message of hope, and today, it has lost none of its power or immediacy.
In addition to Way Station and a number of other Clifford Simak classics, Open Road Media has reprinted a large number of science fiction and fantasy titles from other authors such as Robert Silverberg, Octavia Butler, Greg Bear, Bruce Sterling, and Poul Anderson.