Just Finished Reading Way Station by Clifford Simak

Clifford Simak was one of my favorite science fiction writers of the last century, responsible for several great short stories and the novel City.  I just finished reading his novel Way Station, which came out in 1963 and won the Hugo Award the next year for best science fiction.  I enjoyed it a lot, mainly because Simak raises several points of speculation about topics such as immortality, interstellar space travel, and universal consciousness.  Enoch Wallace, Union Civil War soldier, upon returning home to Wisconsin, finds his home transformed into a "way station" for travelers from other star systems, all of whom belong to the galactic federation.  Seeing that this story, famous at the time among science fiction circles, only predated the original Star Trek TV series...with its own "federation"...by some three years, it raised in me my own speculation whether that series may have at least in part been derived from Simak's tale.  Seeing how most of Way Station's narrative takes place in the early 1960s...and Wallace is for all practical purposes the same age as he was a century earlier...suspicions naturally arise as to what's going on with this peculiar, reclusive soul.  Eventually, the Feds catch wind of his situation and send an agent to investigate.  Why Enoch doesn't age, what comes out of the government snooping and what the extraterrestrials are really up to are just some of the interwoven story lines that at the end tie up very neatly...sometimes you just want to read a story that has been well thought out like that.  Although I preferred City, Way Station gets my recommendation as well.  One point that bothered me was what happened to the aliens when they "travelled" over vast distances of space almost instantaneously, but since that's part of the story development you may want to find this out for yourself instead of me spoiling the plot.  Ultimately, the story concerns itself with the nature of human violence and how we can curb our instincts in that direction in order to survive as a species.  Look it up and read it...it's a story in which I could put myself in the protagonist's place and let my imagination run loose.  I think Internet Archive has it for download...