Way Station

Enoch Wallace fought at Gettysburg and still walks his Wisconsin farm, more than a century later, looking about thirty. His neighbours have long since stopped remarking on it. Inside the sealed and windowless house that was once his family home, Enoch keeps a way station on a galactic transit network, receiving travellers from across the arm of the galaxy, sitting with them, listening, and sending them on. He ages only in the hour or so each day he spends outdoors. It has been a good life, private and strange, sustained by alien friendships and the journals he keeps. But a government agent has begun asking questions about the man who does not die, the wider galaxy has troubles of its own that may see the Earth station closed, and the world outside Enoch's fence is edging towards a war that will finish it. Simak writes with the unhurried attention of someone who genuinely likes rural Wisconsin, and his novel is gentle without being soft: a book about loneliness, about the dignity of small kindnesses, and about whether a species this violent deserves a place among the stars.