Ahh 😌 I love the quietness of Simak's writing. He deals with big questions calmly, he's enchanting and optimistic, but tinged with sadness, opening majestic vistas while acknowledging the transitoriness of life and the inevitability of change. I think the sadness is in the limitedness of individual experience, the optimism in the potential of collective growth, and his magic is in seeking to reconcile us to both realities. ( )

Story: 8.0 / 10
Characters: 9
Setting: 7.5
Prose: 9 ( )

First, it is a page turner! That era of sci fi authors were really good at producing stuff that was easy to read and made you want to keep reading, even when the content was pretty unoriginal.

I guess for me I did enjoy it but it feels pretty lightweight of a book - the engagement with the ideas he brings up just feels very limited, mostly asking a few questions but not really working it through. There's a small strange diversion about "shadow people" which are like... Avatars he made up using magic? That he talks to to stop being lonely? It was the only engagement with the obvious issue of loneliness but it was really bizarre - it felt like excerpts from a story on a totally different theme. And then there's a magical deaf-mute girl - yes, literally magical - whose ending point is very obvious when another magical thing is introduced. She is unable to communicate or be communicated with outside of rudimentary gestures, which makes the tropey use of a magical disabled character feel that much more uncomfortable than it already does.

Like, there is a lot of potential with "guy manning an interstellar waystation" but it just doesn't feel like it goes past that. The galactic council is only sketched out but I kept getting hung up on how weird the whole system of transport was (like, there seems to be what, maybe 1 being a day going through his waystation, on average? Which suggests this is a super luxury, expensive thing. But there's just casual people going through to a random festival. But the way the routes are described means you'd think a *lot* of people would have to go through to this same festival. But they don't! It feels like the author didn't think through the scale at all, which I realise sounds daft, but... idk it bugged me). There's some stuff brought up about the weird emotions of being an alien to humans and a human to aliens and where he feels he belongs but there's minimal follow through - it feels like the author just couldn't handle the complexity of emotions and was reduced to just gesturing at the concept. And the ending is just daft.

Like, overall I enjoyed my time with it, but I'm not sure that I'd ever recommend it over any other sci fi book from the era because it doesn't really deliver on ideas or literaryness ( )

I had fond memories of Way Station, but it has not aged well, or perhaps more accurately, SF has matured a lot in 60 years. To its credit, this jumps right into the central idea -- one human running a way station for alien travelers passing through on their way to a big universe Earth is not part of. And it tries to get away from the pulp adventure Simak arose from. But in its place is endless navel gazing, a much too neat and not credible plot resolution that is obvious long before the end, and a denouement that seems forced in the extreme.

Disappointing. ( )

I first read this in the late 1970s and loved it for a charming, pastoral delivery of a SF Contact novel. I just reread it for the first time since then and I'm again amazed at Simak's understated complexity. This really is a gently- and clearly-told rural fable of a man given extended life in the hills of Wisconsin to operate a cloaked interstellar transfer point; it is also a rumination on individual and species maturity and responsibility. The Cold War drama that lurks offstage in the original telling now can reflect the ideological crises in the US and world at large in 2021; are we mature enough taken singly or as a whole to survive, let alone participate in a star-spanning civilization?

Adding both great nuance and strength to this is the slowly-revealed crisis ongoing within that greater civilization; Ulysses, the ET contact, seems to wonder if they as a whole are mature enough to survive as a civilization. There is also a minor sub-plot involving some characters that appear to be Constructs of Enoch's and what occurs (in my interpretation) represents all the fancies and conceits one must let go of to move on. Kids can't keep believing in Santa Claus, Enoch has to release his creations, and mankind will have to give up some closely-held but ultimately fruitless passions as well: perhaps notions of race or socioeconomic superiority.

Read this, but read it more slowly that you might given the easy way it's told. This is Simak's best novel because it still carries that weight in its pages. ( )