This was a fun little book, which I enjoyed with caveats. I do feel like it is a bit hard to get into without too many spoilers. I will do my best.
Enoch Wallace runs an interplanitary Way Station on Earth. He is the sole person tasked with this responsibility. More than whatever this labor entails, the story does focus on the lonliness that he has from this task, and there is a lot of philosophical musings on his part. Despite this, there is a plot that keeps you going. And for how short this book is, it really does seem packed with a lot of really cool stuff.
Stylistically, something about this book screams ‘old sci-fi’. I don’t think I can put it into words. I don’t think it is done in a bad way, but it shows its age. Part of it is that there is a sort of ‘info dump’ beginning that a lot of older sci-fi suffers from, a consequence of the fact that when the genre was young there were less communicative short hands for information that might not be evident from context to the readers. It might also be that hope there was in the 50s and 60’s that there would be in the future some kind of science of spiritualism that seems to now have fallen out of fashion (to which I am grateful). Writing is in a way a technology that progress with time, and science fiction as a genre has learned to convey information in a way that relies less on older strategies.
I really resonated with this story.
Silly side note: I was super happy when Simak at some point describes the conciet of this story as a “Roadside Picnic”. This was published more than a decade before that novel, and so it made me wonder if maybe the Strugatsky bros had read this. Maybe, maybe not, but fun to speculate none the less.
Failures in Polymathy 