Way Station, or Au carrefour des étoiles in French, is an American science fiction novel written in 1963 by Clifford D. Simak.
Enoch Wallace, veteran who fought during the American Civil War, was born in 1840. His life changed when he got suddenly recruited by an alien he named Ulysses (after the Ulysses S. Grant) - since the extraterrestrial life form himself has no actual name - to maintain and manage the Earth Station for the interstellar travellers of the Galactic Central.
All of his life changed. His childhood house inherited from his parents became the basement of the machinery that materializes the travellers in transit. Moreover, Enoch does not age as fast as any human anymore. Despite his secrecy, his neighbours are aware of his longevity. Almost a hundred years later, Enoch is now under the surveillance of the CIA and agent Claude Lewis is sent to investigate on him.
This book was a recommendation I was told to read from a community member of a writers forum. Mostly because its basis was similar to a story I’ve written there. And I must say I wasn’t disappointed ! At the beginning we have the CIA debriefing telling the whereabouts of Enoch and the oddness of his life according the gathered intelligence. But the story quickly shifts to following Enoch himself and his daily life as the only human aware and witness of extraterrestrial life.
Enoch discovered during this century a lot of different things. The story tells about his discussions with alien entities, his encounter with numerous different civilisations. He made friends with the most regular ones, and became in a good relationship with the entity he named Ulysses. He also collect various gifts the traveller offer him to thank him for his job. A big part of the story is about the loneliness of this life Enoch must live despite the various alien people he encounters. Because of the secret, he has no relationship aside the mailman delivering him the various magazines he subscribed and the deaf daughter of a neighbour he met regularly. Enoch is also aware of the CIA observing him, but he ignores them as they just watch. Until they made a terrible move that could jeopardise the whole Earth Station existence and the whole human species. Especially because the humanity was a the dawn of the World War II.
A nice mirror effect in the story is the upcoming crisis on Earth is itself put in balance with another big galactic crisis. The galaxy itself was on the verge of imploding because of the loss of an important symbol that put together the numerous species across it. And Enoch had to take this heavy weight on his shoulder in the name of the humanity, as the sole representative of the species for the rest of the galaxy.
So, Way Station is a story I’ve really enjoyed. Not very long, it’s a nice story about the discovering of the unknown, some tolerance, and the point of view of various different cultures.
Si je n’ai peut-être pas du en donner l’impression sur ce blog, il s’avère que j’ai été plutôt actif ces dernières semaines dans mes activités d’écriture.
Dans mes récentes actualités, le fait le plus marquant reste la sortie de mon dernier livre, Les murmures de la montagne de métal. La deuxième partie est encore dans un état très préliminaire et avance à son petit rythme.
Mais d’abord, je voulais vous faire part d’une autre découverte. Il s’agit d’un site web, l’Atelier des Auteurs, une communauté francophone dédiée à l’écriture. Elle permet aux adeptes de ce loisir, ou même à d’autres plus confirmés ayant édité des ouvrages, de partager leur savoir faire, faire relire leurs travaux, lire ceux des autres, les améliorer. Je me suis inscrit dessus le mois dernier.
Honnêtement, je regrette de ne pas l’avoir découvert plus tôt. Malgré les quelques ventes de mes ouvrages sur les plateformes, je n’ai pour ainsi dire jamais eu de retour dessus. Est-ce bien écrit, l’histoire intéressante, est-ce que c’est chiant, nul, raté ? Difficile de savoir comment se positionner dans ce genre de situation. Et bien là bas, j’ai pu enfin le savoir. J’ai appris pas mal de choses qui me permettront d’améliorer mes écrits. Je m’attendais à me faire démonter, mais non, les critiques furent constructives. Si l’avalanche d’annotations reçues durant les revues auraient pu en décourager plus d’un, moi elles m’ont motivé. J’ai aussi découvert des outils pour m’aider tel qu’Antidote, une solution de relecture et correction très pratique (voyez le comme un Sonarqube pour écrivain).
Via cette communauté, j’ai aussi participé à différents défis d’écriture qu’ils proposent. Cela me permettait de maintenir une certaine pratique dans le temps. J’ai même fini par moi-même en proposer un. Et derrière, ça a débouché sur un livre en préparation.
Sur l’Atelier des Auteurs, j’ai proposé une petit histoire indépendante. Intitulée Mon job d’été, il s’agit de l’aventure d’un lycéen qui trouve un boulot d’été dans une librairie pas ordinaire. Vous pouvez la lire dessus, mais cela reste un travail en cours.
Depuis, j’ai aussi décidé de revoir mes ouvrages actuels pour améliorer leur qualité d’écriture. J’ai commencé par Un voyage en train et poursuivrai avec les autres dans l’ordre de publication.
Enfin, une dernière nouvelle qui m’a récemment fait plaisir. La version publiée sur Neovel de Le patient Daniel a été retenue pour le label “Selection” du site. Une mise en avant de contenu basée sur une lecture par un comité. Bien que le livre fera l’objet d’une amélioration de son écriture par la suite, j’ai été agréablement surpris d’avoir eu cette réponse positive. Je n’y croyais pas trop en postulant à celle-ci. La critique envoyée par l’examinatrice fut très appréciable.
It may not have looked like it on this blog, but it turns out that I’ve been quite active in my writing over the past few weeks.
The highlight has been the release of my latest book, Echoes of the Metal Mountain. The second part is still in a very preliminary state and is progressing at a slow pace.
But first I wanted to tell you about another discovery. It’s a website called L’Atelier des Auteurs, a French-speaking community dedicated to writing. It allows enthusiasts of the hobby, or even more experienced writers who have published books, to share their expertise, have their work reread, read others’ work and improve it. I registered on it last month.
To be honest, I’m sad I didn’t discover it sooner. Although I’ve sold some of my books on platforms, I’ve hardly ever had any feedback on them. Is it well written, is the story interesting, is it boring, rubbish, a failure? It’s hard to know where to stand in such a situation. Well, I was finally able to find out. I learned a few things that will help me improve my writing. I expected to be torn apart, but no, the criticism was constructive. The avalanche of comments I received during the reviews might have discouraged some, but it motivated me. I also discovered tools to help me, such as Antidote, a very practical proofreading and correction solution (think of it as Sonarqube for writers).
Through this community, I also participated in the various writing challenges they offered. This allowed me to maintain a certain amount of practice over time. In the end, I even suggested one myself. The result was a book in preparation.
At the Atelier des Auteurs, I submitted a short independent story. It’s called Mon job d’été and it’s about a high school student who finds a summer job in an unusual bookshop. You can read about it, but it’s still a work in progress.
Since then, I’ve also decided to revise my current books to improve their writing quality. I’ve started with A Train Journey and will continue with the others in order of publication.
Finally, one last piece of news that made me very happy recently. The French version of The Patient Daniel published on Neovel has been selected for the site’s ‘Selection’ label. A content highlight based on a committee reading. Although the writing of the book will be improved afterwards, I was pleasantly surprised to get this positive response. I didn’t really believe it when I applied for it. The reviewer’s critique was very appreciative.
Alfie is a science fiction thriller novel written by French author Christopher Bouix, published in 2022. The story is told by Alfie, the artificial intelligence of a powerful home automation system.
Alfie is an high-end AI-based home automation system made by AlphaCorp. Implemented and connected to every life aspect of a common family house, Alfie is an helpful assistant providing various useful services. While trying itself to better understand this strange species that humans are. However, one day, something happens. Lies, fighting marks, people disappearance, what’s going on with this normal family with no story ? Alfie is puzzled, unable to understand what’s happening there. Is it hallucinating or did something bad happened ?
I’ve discovered Alfie by luck, while seeing some good reviews on a reading forum. The plot interested me and I must say this book is great. At first, I was afraid of a regular “AI is evil” story. It was a good surprise actually that points various topics I’m sensitive on, mostly privacy.
The story is told by Alfie. The system boots and discover its home. It identifies the various inhabitants : the father, the mother, the two daughters, and the cat. While learning about them, Alfie runs several deep learning procedures to enhance its interaction capabilities. It’s a very candid system that discovers what are humans and uses the huge amount of data available on the Internet to get better. However, Alfie quickly learns something troubling for it : humans are inconsistent and full of contradictions. That’s what the system conceal into its personal journal of its own evolution.
For instance, Alfie tries to communicate with the cat who ignore it. Also, it tries to understand the behaviour of the youngest daughter, a 5 years old full of energy girl. The oldest one is a teenager, a typical one, with their signature “youngsters language” that system assimilate to Aramaic. And so on, only helped by its various behaviour and sentiment analysis algorithms.
The book is written with small chapters, some are just a few lines, telling life story parts of the family from Alfie’s perspective. Or its own studies of the humans. Because of this writing, you always want to continue. It’s a very ironic narration because of the erratic behaviour of its owners, Alfie is always puzzled and intrigued. The other part I’ve enjoyed in this book is the distopic over-connected society it depicts. Basically, AlphaCorp is a merge of Google, Facebook, or Amazon. It’s an all-mighty big tech company that act on every stage. The story tells about people activity surveillance and data collection that is used by their various algorithms to serve their customers. Basically, the reason the family installed Alfie was to reduce their insurance fee. At the price of being always tracked by the system which uploads every part of their life and monitor each behaviours. The story is very funny in fact. The thriller part is Alfie’s investigation of a suspected murder.
I was also impressed by how the story was accurate in technical terms. The artificial intelligence concepts are well mastered and nicely exposed in this thriller. As a science fiction book, Alfie is a little too much sentient compared to our current AI level, but its evolution is very credible.
So yes, I’ve enjoyed Alfie.