Book Review: Way Station

Clifford Simak
1963
Awards: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

This is a little gem of a book. Simak’s writing is calm and un-showy, but it also keeps you very much engaged. His main character, Enoch Wallace, is a very appealing person: unusually understanding and tolerant of strangeness.

As a young man, Wallace was a soldier in the Civil War. Very disturbed by the experience, he returned from the war to his small house in an isolated part of rural Wisconsin to become basically a hermit.

As the years go by, Wallace keeps very much to himself. His neighbors comment to each other that he doesn’t really seem to be aging very fast but otherwise they hardly give him a thought.

The decades come and go and eventually it is the 1960s. The government authorities have finally started to pay attention to the vague local folklore about this man who supposedly was a soldier in the Civil War and yet still looks like he’s thirty. So they start snooping around his innocuous-looking shack of a house.

What they don’t realize is that Wallace is the keeper of a way station for interstellar travelers. When he first came back from the war, a benevolent intergalactic travel consortium identified him as someone who would be receptive and open to them and also as someone who could keep a very large secret. They began to use his house as a rest stop and a transfer point during their light-speed journeys across the universe. In return, they provide him with everything he needs to maintain the station, and they have made it so that he does not age at all when he’s inside his house. The only time he gets any older is when he goes outside to get the mail.

An added benefit to Wallace is that, as the keeper of the way station, he gets to meet many different kinds of extraterrestrials. He is a curious person, and wants to learn about these other beings, and even makes friends with some of them. He manages, with the aliens’ help, to keep up to date on technology and physics and current events so he knows what is going on in the world around him.

He very much enjoys his job--and I enjoyed it with him. I found myself admiring the open-minded, galactic-level perspective of the aliens. And I got caught up in the easy pace of Wallace's intellectually-stimulating responsibilities, wishing that the snoopers would just go away and his station-keeper life could just go on and on the way it has been forever.

But, inevitably, of course, there is trouble. The whole situation threatens to blow wide open after an alien traveler dies at his house while waiting for a transfer and the government investigators discover the body respectfully buried outside in Wallace’s 19th-century family plot.

The only real problem I had with the book was a bit of deus ex machina used at the end to resolve everything, which was unfortunate. But overall this was a fun and unexpectedly touching story.


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.