July and August 2025 Book Clubs: Way Station by Clifford D. Simak, and The Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison

 July-

  

Way Station by Clifford D. Simak

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Sci-Fi
Content: Clean

 

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...

  

I had high hopes for this going into this. I liked the idea of the way station that aliens stopped at here on earth. I was looking forward to meeting the different alien species. It brought to mind the short story Why I Left Harry's All Night Hamburgers by Lawrence Watt-Evans, which I loved. 

While I think the concept of this book was great, unfortunately, I felt like it lacked in execution. I was pulled in at the beginning and it seemed like it was going to be great, but then somewhere along the way it took a turn that didn't work for me. This is a book that's very much a product of it's time. The cold war was on everyone's mind and it permeated fiction. So instead of this book being just about aliens stopping at a way station and sharing their adventures with us, we got "our world is doomed and we have to stop it from happening" as well. The main character decided just based on his own observations that this is sure to happen and almost agrees to some very drastic measures, that quite frankly would have been just as devastating as war. Imagine what would happen if we suddenly lost all technology, even the memory of it. A lot of people would die from lack of food, warmth, shelter, etc. Luckily our main character here decided against that route, but not because he realized it would be just as bad. But this isn't were I first realized the book was going off the rails for me.

The first indication that this book was going to be a bit of a disappointment was when the imaginary friends manifest, including a love interest (two things that will surely ruin a classic sci-fi book for me are the terribly developed female characters, and instant romance that seems to happen in a lot of these). I get that this guy is lonely for human companionship, but this was just ridiculous. It also felt more like magic and less like science in this sci-fi book. That wasn't the only part that felt magical. There's a deux ex machina moment at the end as well, involving another character, that didn't work for me either. And please don't get me started on the way the government just gave him back a dead alien body they had stolen when he told them he needed it back. We all know that would never happen.

All this being said, I still enjoyed parts of this book. I liked the parts with the aliens and the descriptions of them. I wish the book had leaned into that more. I think my rating for this is skewed a bit because I liked the concept, and I enjoyed it more than most of the other classic sci-fi books I've read. I just can't bring myself to give a rating as low as 2.5.

 

 

 

 August-

 

The Stainless Steel Rat (The Stainless Steel Rat #1) by Harry Harrison

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Sci-Fi
Content: Clean

 

*Beware some minor spoilers ahead. 

This book started off great. I was really into the heist that was going on. The main character was cocky and sure of himself. No one was smarter than him. At least that's what he thought. I got quite a few laughs out of this when he gets outsmarted by nearly everyone else. Just from the description you know he gets caught and recruited to work on the side of the law. 

There was a point while reading this that I thought it was going to go the way of most of the other classic sci-fi books I've read with the sexism. However, I was surprised that the main character ended up being thwarted multiple times by his sexist views. He was constantly underestimating this woman he meets in the book. I felt like this book was ahead of it's time in the way this was portrayed, even if she was also a psychopath. 

So I was enjoying the first half of this until he decides that he's in love with this woman that he doesn't really know. You see, she's beautiful, and she's clever like him, except for the inconvenient fact that she's also a psychopath. But lets not let that fact get in the way. She's beautiful and he can fix her by erasing the psychopathic part of her brain, if he can only catch her. Also, her psychosis ends up being about her looks. Yeah, this is where the book went downhill for me. And all of that progress the book made, being ahead of it's time was slowly erased and ruined by the time I got to the end. 

The author had something good going for a while but he had to ruin it. I'm still giving it 3 stars for the parts I liked.