22 March, 2002
Way Station
Clifford D. Simak
1963
210 pp
Simak's one of those authors whose books I remember seeing often on library shelves, back in the day, but which never attracted me enough to pick them up. Recently, I re-discovered the thrills of the library (ten years at the U of C, and I only just realized that there's a fairly extensive selection of popular fiction in Harper Library), and sure enough, there was Simak. A recent thread on rec.arts.sf.written had drawn his work to my attention, this book in particular. The first few pages seemed interesting, so I checked it out.
This book is about Enoch Wallace, a fellow who lives by himself in rural Wisconsin. He keeps to himself, and mostly stays around his Civil War-era farmhouse, although he does take a walk through the surrounding countryside each day when he goes to get the mail. He's followed the same routine for about a hundred years, ever since he agreed to allow his homestead to become a way station for interstellar travellers who have stopovers on Earth. Part of the package was a vastly expanded lifespan. In 1961, Wallace looks just as young as he did in 1886.
However, all is not well in the life of Enoch Walace, Stationmaster. The CIA has discovered him, and has him under surveillance. They don't know what he's up to, but they know he's up to something. After all, people don't naturally live a hundred years without a sign of aging! Worse, the Earth appears to be teetering on the edge of global thermonuclear destruction.
I enjoyed this book a lot. The plot is certainly interesting enough, but at its heart, Way Station is a character study. It's about how an ordinary person develops when he's placed in an extraordinary situation. He feels lost between two worlds: the human society of Earth, and the galactic society whose citizens travel through the way station. He's an outsider to both-- isolated from human society by time, and from galactic society by distance. Nonetheless, he cares deeply about the fate of both civilizations, and yearns for a day when the Earth has developed enough to become a member of the "galactic cofraternity."
He stood there, in the late summer sun, and shivered in the cold wind that seemed to be blowing out of some unknown dimension of unreality, wondering for the first time (for the first time he ever had been forced to wonder at it) what kind of man he was. A haunted man who must spend his days neither completely alien nor completely human, with divided loyalties, with old ghosts to tramp the years and miles with him no matter which life he might choose, the Earth life or the stars? A cultural half-breed, understanding neither Earth nor the stars, owing a debt to each, but paying neither one? A homeless, footless, wandering creature who could recognize neither right nor wrong from having seen so many different (and logical) versions of the right and wrong?
Simak's writing style was a pleasant surprise. Unlike a lot of science fiction authors of his era, he's actually a pretty good writer. Occasionally, his narration seems a bit too detached for a story so strongly centered on exploring one person's character, but overall Simak's writing is definitely a cut above average. I can see why I wasn't interested in him when I was a teenager, but his style, at least as exemplified by Way Station very much suits my current tastes.