Way station
Enoch Wallace is an ageless hermit, striding across his untended farm as he has done for over a century, still carrying the gun with which he had served in the Civil War. But what his neighbors must never know is that, inside his unchanging house, he meets with a host of unimaginable friends from the farthest stars. More than a hundred years before, an alien named Ulysses had recruited Enoch as the keeper of Earth's only galactic transfer station. Now, as Enoch studies the progress of Earth and tends the tanks where the aliens appear, the charts he made indicate his world is doomed to destruction. His alien friends can only offer help that seems worse than the dreaded disaster. Then he discovers the horror that lies across the galaxy...
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2011–2022years
100% recommend
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What Hacker News says
- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it always makes me smile.
The Gap series by Stephen Donaldson. It's grimly compelling, very dark characters.
Way Station by Clifford Simak, an odd one maybe but I always liked it.
- I can't pick a favourite so I'll just list some books I love that might not be as well known as some others here.
* Last and First Men, by Olaf Stapledon
* Way Station, by Clifford D. Simak
* The Gap (series), by Stephen Donaldson
* The Golden Apples of the Sun, by Ray Bradbury
* Tau Zero, by Poul Anderson
- You need to read Clifford Simak's "The Way Station"
- > special effects will keep production costs high.
The vast majority of written science fiction doesn't need a lot of special effects.
There are almost uncountably many stories that could be transferred to television or film at no more cost than any other drama. Take Clifford Simak's Way Station for instance, most of Ray Bradbury's stories, J. G. Ballard, and dozens or hundreds more. Even stories with a grand idea and scope like Clarke and Baxter's Light of Other Days hardly need much in the way of complex sets or difficult special effects.
Why is it that science fiction in video form always has to be space opera, alien invasions and so on?
If we are going to go for special effects let's not waste them on more space cowboys. Let's have Charlie Stross's Accelerando and Saturn's Children or Ken McLeod's Sky Road, etc.
- I recently have been reading Hugo Award Novels and recommend Roger Zelazny's This Immortal which is good enough to have shared the award with Dune in 1965. Lord of Light is also a great read and won a Hugo in 1968. Clifford Simak's Way Station, Phillip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle, and Walter Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz are other great Hugo novels from the early 1960's that tend to be overshadowed by more famous authors from that period such as Heinlein (not that I wouldn't recommend The Moon is a Harsh Mistress if you haven't read it).
