The patterns associated with traveler’s bodies tend to break up when they encounter certain kinds of space junk, so stations like the one on Earth are established to ensure safe passage. These aliens have discovered a means of faster-than-light transport that operates something like a transporter does on Star Trek (though, in a more gruesome manifestation of the technology, each traveler’s material body is left dead at its original location, while a new one is materialized for the traveler’s consciousness upon arrival in Simak’s world, bodies are simply material things, containers). Unfortunately for Enoch, the US government, tangled in the treacherous throws of the Cold War, has caught wind of Enoch’s agelessness, and their investigation into the true nature of Enoch’s being and home leads to major revelations about humankind’s place in the universe.įor Enoch is not an ordinary Rip van Winkle, but is actually the keeper of an intergalactic way station placed on Earth by a consortium of far-advanced alien species called the galactic federation.

While neighbors know there is something strange about Enoch, Simak explains that their backwater sense of community leads them all to leave the nature of his existence unexplored. Enoch is still living in his boyhood home in rural Wisconsin, the pastoral setting being a constant motif in Simak’s work. Way Station is the story of Enoch Wallace, a Civil War veteran born in 1840 who is still alive in roughly 1964, when the novel is set.

Science is not necessarily the enemy, but man’s relentless drive for technological innovation is often the reason for the downfall or ruin of humankind. My interest in dystopia is what made me pick up the book in the first place, and many of Simak’s novels reach into the future, sometimes near, sometimes far, sometimes both, in order to explore man’s relation to technology and a search for a higher self, usually through some sort of spiritual and/or intellectual transcendence. Simak’s A Choice of Gods back in May 2011, I found myself quite captivated by Simak’s deft exploration of the nature of man’s technological and spiritual development in a far future dystopia. When I first wrote a review of Clifford D.

Gotta love a plug from the Las Vegas Review Journal.

Way station by clifford d simak