Teaser Tuesday: Clifford D. Simak, “Way Station”

So this week (well, probably several weeks ago by the time this post appears) I was reading Way Station, a classic SF novel from the 1960s by Clifford D. Simak:

Now, the premise of Way Station is that the Earth has been demolished to build a giant scale for checking the mass of traffic on a hyperspace bypass … (checks notes) … No, wait, sorry, that’s a different kind of weigh station. Way Station is, in fact, about a human Civil War veteran named Enoch who gets recruited by an outfit called Galactic Central to be the operator of a teleportation relay where aliens can pause and rest while teleporting themselves all around the Milky Way, said relays being required because the teleportation beams become too attenuated by dust and other space debris to allow for direct transit over vast distances. Plus, Earth is apparently the only place in the galaxy where you can get good coffee. Just ask Enoch’s primary alien contact, whom Enoch has dubbed Ulysses:

“Perhaps,” said Enoch, fighting back the realization that was crowding in on him, crowding in too fast, “I could offer you some victuals. I could cook up some coffee …”

“Coffee,” said Ulysses, smacking his thin lips. “Do you have the coffee?”

“I’ll make a big pot of it. I’ll break in an egg* so it will settle clear …”

“Delectable,” Ulysses said. “Of all the drinks that I have drank on all the planets I have visited, the coffee is the best.”

Clifford D. Simak, Way Station

Ulysses: A coffee achiever … FROM SPACE!!!

One suspects that Ulysses would approve of the coffee maker aboard the Rocinante, and might even have the technology to repair said coffee maker after its untimely destruction**.

Interestingly, the teleportation in Way Station involves leaving the traveler’s original body behind in a tank (to be recycled back into its constituent materials) while the consciousness gets transmitted to its next destination, whereupon the body is reassembled with all its memories and experiences intact. The book explicitly acknowledges that this entails the death of the original travel, as well might be expected, given that the abandoned body gets turned into the same sort of goo that’s used to recreate the bodies of subsequently-arriving travelers. (This is the same approach to teleportation that occurs in one of my favorite books, China Miéville’s Kraken, albeit without the small army of teleportation ghosts that appear in that novel.) Whether or not it’s worth effectively dying and having a copy of your consciousness continue on in another body is a price worth paying for instantaneous travel is an exercise left to the reader, although I have a feeling people who are routinely stuck in traffic on the 5 or around New York City or in Atlanta or in any other traffic-choked city around the world might have a tendency to vote a particular way.

* I looked this up, but I have no plans to try it.
** Uh, spoilers, I guess?