Goodreads review of ‘Way Station’
Way Station by Clifford D. Simak
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The strength of this novel, which won the 1963 Hugo Award, is in its main character, Enoch Wallace. He observes carefully and thinks deeply, and the novel is often quiet and reflective.
One hundred years ago, his home in the secluded countryside of Wisconsin next to the Mississippi River became a secret way station for aliens traveling through the galaxy. He has stopped aging. What does his strange new life mean?
“For he remembered now how he had been sitting on the steps thinking how he was alone and about a new beginning, knowing that he could not escape a new beginning, and that he must start from scratch and build his life anew. And here, suddenly, was that new beginning — more wondrous and fearsome than anything he could have dreamed in an insane moment.”
For most of the novel, it’s a simple story without much action, but slowly, small mistakes and the dangers of Earth’s 1960s and atomic war brinksmanship build into existential peril.
“Somewhere, he thought, on the long backtrack of history, the human race had accepted an insanity for a principle and had persisted in it until today that insanity-turned-principle stood ready to wipe out, if not the race itself, at least all of those things, both material and immaterial, that had been fashioned as symbols of humanity through many hard-won centuries.”
The point of the novel is what this means to Enoch, to humanity, and beyond. “And that was the secret of the universe, Enoch told himself — a thing that went on caring.”
