Way Station

Way Station
© 1963 by Clifford D. Simak

Way Station – damn you! How I wanted to hate you! How I wanted to throw you in the fire, or at least the used book bin, half-read, and me cursing the wasted hours, never to be mine again.

On the surface, your faults are glaring. A dull, humdrum protagonist (I’m almost yawning now), two-dimensional supporting characters (I’ve added a dimension in charity), and an abundance of clichés ranging from the tough-as-nails CIA agent, the country bumpkins and yokels and huck-yuck Deliverance types, the deaf-dumb-and-blind girl, the stoic anti-war war veteran. Prose laden with basic grammar-school adjectives, dialogue that feels constrained in a strait-jacket, blocks and blocks of characters thinking their thoughts right out on the page as if they were shouting at us through a bull-horn. Oh, Way Station, how did thy win a Nebula Award?

Wait – is the Nebula Award the SF honor voted by the crowds, a science fiction People’s Choice award? I think it is. No science fiction author in his right mind would vote for it for a Hugo, the Oscars of the genre …

But wait. I steel myself to say this, but, but … there is something here.

I could not put the book down. I would have finished it in three days or so, but due to life events, it took me a week. And I had to see how it ended.

What happened?

Ideas, I suppose. And a strange quality that called back to an innocent era, an innocent time, half-a-century ago. Well, perhaps innocent is not the best descriptor of this elusive quality. How about – what’s the opposite of "not-jaded"?

Back to the ideas. In a sentence, the novel is about aliens who, in establishing a galactic way station (think of a train depot) here on Earth, encounter a Civil War veteran and convince him to operate it. A little more detail? Okay. The way station is the man’s house, as done by Alien Home Makeover. It’s now impenetrable to any weapon on Earth. And as a bonus, our hero doesn’t age, due to some rays or something the alien machinery gives off. A century passes, and he’s amassed quite a bit of knowledge about the strange denizens of our universe.

There’s some intrigue that takes place in the last third of the book. I thought I predicted the outcome, but I didn’t, then I thought it would all end with a swell, cleaned-up denoument, but it didn’t. So, points for that.

The best part of Way Station is, I think, those ideas Simak develops. The different types of alien species, as well as some of the gadgets they bring with them, are intriguing. I like the pyramid of smooth ping-pong balls that can be moved any which way but stay in the shape of a pyramid. What is it? Maybe a game, maybe a calculator? Maybe an ethical or a philosophical calculator? The holodeck, made famous in the second Star Trek series, makes an appearance here. There’s also mention of a method the aliens have of dealing with hostile cultures – mentally incapacitating the population of a planet so that its beings can no longer operate weapons of mass destruction. This lasts for a couple of generations, then gradually wears off, yielding a new renaissance. The only downside is the fact that not only is warfare forgotten, so is manufacture, food supply, mathematics and science, etc.

The method of travel described in the novel was slightly creepy to me over a single point: the issue of whether living entities have souls, and how this would be affected by teleportation. Simak argues that we do, and it is merely souls that are transmitted throughout the galaxy. A new body is created at every new entry point. And what happens to the old ones? Well, our hero has gigantic vats of acid in the cavernous basement city the alien engineers have built for him …

So, a verdict? C+. Could have been a B had the craft been better. But it’s saved by that one thing every writer, every novelist needs: the elicitation of the desire in the reader to turn the page and see how it ends.