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mburnamfink 's review for:
Way Station
by Clifford D. Simak
Way Station is a novel of big ideas wrapped in a very small plot. The story is centered around the life of Enoch Wallace, a human keeper of a Galactic Waystation. The exterior of the way station is a 19th century house in rural Wisconsin, but the interior is locked away behind impenetrable walls and strange devices. Enoch himself is over 100 years old, aging only an hour a day on his regular walks to collect the mail. The rest of the time, he reads the newspapers and swaps stories with the aliens who stop-over in his home. Over the course of a few weeks in the early 1960s, events converge on the Way Station and it's humble keeper, with the fate of Earth and the Galaxy hanging in the balance.
The strength of this novel is in the descriptive writing; there's a grandeur and melancholic beauty to Simak. His style isn't to my taste, but others might find it more enjoyable. It reminds me a little of Bradbury, although without Bradbury's interest in liminal experiences. Enoch feels very real as a man without a world: a Civil War veteran alive in the 20th century, an Earthman serving the Galactic Community, but as a non-member species judged too violent and dangerous to be admitted to the interstellar brotherhood.
However, on almost every other basis, this novel is adequate at best. For all the great descriptions, there are passages of solipsistic musing. The main technology of the Way Station is a destructive teleporter, one that explicitly leaves behind a corpse in the basement. Of course, the theological problems are avoided since spirituality and souls have an objective basis in the setting, as real as electromagnetism or gravity. Much of the tension centers around the lost Talisman, an artifact that lets a sensitive person tap into the universal spiritual force and bind all the races together in goodwill. A subset of the problem is the looming threat of nuclear war on Earth, which Enoch has divined as certain using alien social science. And this is finally echoed again in the violent hatred of the Fishers family, Enoch's backwards neighbors.
There are big questions here: the nature of superior beings, where a man's loyalties lie, if peace is possible between radically difference species. Unfortunately, at almost every turn Simak picks the most treacly answer. This is a better book than They'd Rather Be Right, or The Big Time, because Simak knows how words fit together, but it's rather a letdown from the previous grand slams in the Hugo Awards.
The strength of this novel is in the descriptive writing; there's a grandeur and melancholic beauty to Simak. His style isn't to my taste, but others might find it more enjoyable. It reminds me a little of Bradbury, although without Bradbury's interest in liminal experiences. Enoch feels very real as a man without a world: a Civil War veteran alive in the 20th century, an Earthman serving the Galactic Community, but as a non-member species judged too violent and dangerous to be admitted to the interstellar brotherhood.
However, on almost every other basis, this novel is adequate at best. For all the great descriptions, there are passages of solipsistic musing. The main technology of the Way Station is a destructive teleporter, one that explicitly leaves behind a corpse in the basement. Of course, the theological problems are avoided since spirituality and souls have an objective basis in the setting, as real as electromagnetism or gravity. Much of the tension centers around the lost Talisman, an artifact that lets a sensitive person tap into the universal spiritual force and bind all the races together in goodwill. A subset of the problem is the looming threat of nuclear war on Earth, which Enoch has divined as certain using alien social science. And this is finally echoed again in the violent hatred of the Fishers family, Enoch's backwards neighbors.
There are big questions here: the nature of superior beings, where a man's loyalties lie, if peace is possible between radically difference species. Unfortunately, at almost every turn Simak picks the most treacly answer. This is a better book than They'd Rather Be Right, or The Big Time, because Simak knows how words fit together, but it's rather a letdown from the previous grand slams in the Hugo Awards.