8 /10 1 Votes
Cover artist Ronald Fratell Publication date 1963 Originally published June 1963 Genre Science Fiction Country United States of America | 4/5 Goodreads Language English ISBN 978-0345284204 Publisher Doubleday Awards Hugo Award for Best Novel | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Media type Print (hardback & paperback) Similar The Goblin Reservation, Ring Around the Sun, They Walked Like Men, All Flesh is Grass, City | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Way Station is a 1963 science fiction novel by American writer Clifford D. Simak, originally published as Here Gather the Stars in two parts in Galaxy Magazine in June and August 1963. Way Station won the 1964 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
Contents
Plot summary
Enoch Wallace, an American Civil War veteran, is chosen by an alien called Ulysses to administer a way station for interplanetary travel. Travelers arrive by a form of teleportation by duplication, where the original body remains at the source and a new live copy is created at the destination. Enoch's job is to monitor the machinery of the way station and make sure arrival conditions meet the biological needs of the wide variety of aliens. The work is not difficult, but requires him to adopt an extremely broad and open-minded perspective. Sometimes he is able to communicate in some fashion with them, befriending and gaining a sense of fellowship with many individuals and races.
Wallace is the only human being who knows of the existence of these aliens, until almost a hundred years later, when the US government becomes aware of and suspicious about his failure to age or die. Factions in the galactic federation want to close off development of Earth's entire arm of the galaxy to concentrate resources elsewhere, and the government's stealing the body of a dead alien gives them impetus to push forward, while the loss of an artifact giving contact with the spirit of the universe causes galactic civilization to begin to fray.
The novel has a number of seemingly disconnected subplots that are not resolved until the conclusion of the book. One such subplot is related to the fact that the government is very interested in Enoch and spies on him for an indeterminate time. Enoch's closest neighbors are an asocial and coarse hillbilly family whose daughter is a deaf mute. She heals warts, birds and butterflies and is the total antithesis of her clan. By adopting an alien math, Enoch is able to compute that the world will go to war and eventually commit nuclear suicide. Strangely, Enoch has a gun he never uses except in an elaborate hunting simulation. Enoch's ghostly support system, which he created years ago, collapses on him during the course of the novel. Finally, Enoch is left with the choice of allowing the Earth to destroy itself in war or call down a galaxy sponsored "dumbing down" that would last for generations but avert the looming war.
Themes
The book addresses the Cold War and basic human drives towards violence and peace from a science fiction perspective.
Awards and nominations
Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
In 2004 Revelstone Entertainment optioned the movie rights to Way Station.