Review: Way Station

Way Station by Clifford D. Simak
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a 3-star review. That is a charitable estimate of my experience with this book. I was expecting the classic of the SF genre and Hugo Award-winning "Best Novel" to be much better.

The basic outline of the book is that our protagonist, Enoch Wallace, lucked into being contacted by an alien from outer space. The alien, named Ulysses by Enoch, asks Enoch to manage an intergalactic waystation.

Essentially, beings are tossed across the galaxy. Dust and other galactic ephemera limit the distance that can be traveled in a single jump. Waystations are required to permit travelers to reach farther destinations.

There are two major and a few minor elements of this book that undermine the reading experience.

The first major element is the consistent use of internal monologues. Enoch carefully weighs each decision in his mind. He also reflects on the many new cultures and friends he has experienced courtesy of his position as a stationmaster.

We rarely see Enoch interacting with other characters. We do not learn about new cultures and new alien species as part of regular interactions. Enoch just reflects and emotes. This one factor alone almost caused me to not finish the book.

There are extended segments of the book where Enoch is faced with the choice between joining the galactic co-fraternity and leaving Earth or remaining on Earth with the hope that his new knowledge and experiences will help humanity survive. The essence of these sections is that this decision is hard. Not a surprise, but not terribly interesting after the first few pages of dithering.

This book is a classic example of why "showing" is better than "telling".

The second major element is the use of so many different aspects of alien cultures and technologies. One section will focus on a new system of mathematics. Another section will focus on alien "thaumaturgy" as a method for focusing spiritual essence to create a new being.

Some of these sections pay off at the end of the book. There are extended discussions with Ulysses about intergalactic politics influencing where new waystations are located.

Other sections just pad the number of pages. Enoch creates some spiritual friends using alien thaumaturgical techniques. They end up drifting away after Enoch fails to ignore the fact that they do not have and will never have a physical aspect. The presence of thaumaturgical "science" has no influence on the outcome of the book.

It is as if the author could not decide which genre tropes he wanted to use. In his moment of indecision, he found himself using all of them. The result is a reading experience that wastes time on marginally explored and incomplete plot lines.

There were a few minor nits to pick.

The waystation system appears to exist solely for the transport of individual entities. It is never obviously used for the transport of freight. Here in reality-land, most transportation involves moving stuff rather than people. As the galactic system appears to be focused on colonizing new worlds, the absence of any freight traffic is a bit odd.

Within the book, there is an object referred to as the Talisman. It ends up being a sort of McGuffin. The Talisman is a device that is used by a spiritually sensitive person to connect various populations with a spiritual essence. The sensitive person travels with the Talisman to each world. They turn it on and the Talisman's connection with spiritual essence fosters peace for that world/population. As a secondary effect, a world where the Talisman has not yet traveled still experiences a sense of hopefulness, peace, and unity with the rest of the galaxy based on the possibility that the Talisman might eventually visit their world.

The entire concept appears to be an attempt to obtain the positive benefits of religion without the perceived obligations and objections that come with belief in a specific religion. It creates an appeal to authority without the need for anyone to submit to that authority.

Which leads to a final criticism. Enoch is of the belief that the various peoples of the rest of the galaxy are in some morally superior to humanity. He presumes that by dint of their acknowledged technical superiority, those peoples are peaceful, cooperative, and otherwise better. Humanity on the brink of nuclear war is considered to be below the standard for acceptance into the galactic co-fraternity. Various non-humans seem to confirm Enoch's self-denigratory perspective.

Yet at the end, a non-human shows up having stolen the Talisman. They are quite willing to commit acts of violence in the furtherance of their unexplored scheme. We also learn of factionalism within the galactic government based on competition for scarce resources as well as for the opportunity of pursuing policies that validate the pride and narrow interests of certain members of the galactic government.

Sounds an awful lot like Earth and the conflicts that occur between our nations and even between various cultural groups within a single nation.

"Waystation" is worth reading once for those interested in the overall history of the speculative fiction genre. Outside of that motivation, I see little to recommend in this book.


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