Most of our contemporary science fiction rattles around a technologically advanced gone wrong future, which is obsessed over the imperfect past we never truly cared to live in. It is a contradiction considering the classics we started off from, like Way Station which envisioned a future of Intergalactic peace and confraternity among Stars. 
 This novel essentially represented a Space Opera during cold war, spatially confined within the private bulwark of a Man from the Earth civil war veteran, by American Midwest. Our anachronistic Highlander, Enoch Wallace, and his House of Leaves soon falls under the surveillance of covert Men in Black, thanks to the static sloppy life he has been protracting for over a century. This classic mystery build up from an outsider pov eventually shifts, and takes the reader through protagonist's eternal loneliness and indirect adventures in an Intergalactic Way Station, for which he is the custodian of. In my imagination Way Station looked like a controlled visitation zone, full of artifacts and sacrosanct knowledge. The novel subtly touches the terrains of human emotions and humanity as a whole through the eyes of alien visitors, hind-bound local yokels and a morally conflicted old man. 
 Might be a bit far fetching, but, Enoch and Lucy had the facsimile of a censored docile Old Man Logan, more with the upcoming movie than the comic it claims to have been adapted off. And I kept wondering whether Douglas Adam's Babel fish came from Simak's pasimology for understanding intergalactic shibboleths, till getting hit by the obvious parental reference - the Bible. Prose has been simple yet classy, and I actually copied down one correspondence between Enoch and an unknown science journal editor, for embellishing my ongoing job covering letters. 
 Way Station was a pleasant reading experience, a calm soft classic sci-fi with little dystopian elements. It hasn't been entirely faultless especially with rushed resolutions and extra nicety around, but none of them mitigated the kernel of the story nor it's debonairness. 
 originally published on 10thandnoble