Way Station

Enoch Wallace fought at Gettysburg, came home to a farm in south western Wisconsin, and is still living in the same house a hundred years later, looking about thirty. The neighbours have stopped asking. A government agent has noticed and is watching from a distance, unable to construct any theory that fits.

The explanation is that the house is a galactic way station. Enoch was recruited by an alien called Ulysses to run a transfer point on a network that moves travellers between stars by copying them, and the house has been rebuilt into something no weapon can scratch. Enoch ages only in the minutes he spends outdoors. Inside, he keeps the machinery, entertains the beings who materialise, and stores the gifts they leave.

He is, in other words, profoundly alone. His friends are a deaf mute girl from a neighbouring farm with an unexplained gift for healing, a deaf mute girl from a neighbouring farm whose gifts nobody can explain, and the old mail carrier who is nearly his only human contact.

Then a body is stolen from the station's cemetery, the galactic council debates closing the whole spur, and Earth's own nuclear crisis comes to a head, and Enoch has to decide whether a species that has never been told any of this deserves to be saved.

Simak keeps the two halves in balance beautifully. The galactic material stays small and domestic, arriving as visitors and objects in one room, while the Wisconsin material carries the real weight: a violent neighbour, a girl nobody protects, and a man who cannot explain himself to anyone.

Around two hundred and ten pages, quiet, rural and unfashionably kind, with almost no violence and a resolution that turns on an object rather than a fight.

Best for readers who want pastoral science fiction, and a novel whose central problem is loneliness rather than an enemy.