The novel “Way Station” by Clifford D. Simak was published for the first time in 1963 in two parts in the “Galaxy” magazine as “Here Gathers the Stars” and later as a book with its final title. It won the Hugo Award for best novel of the year.

Enoch Wallace lives in almost total isolation in rural Wisconsin and yet has attracted the attention of an American intelligence agent because he appears to have fought in the Civil War a century earlier. Surveillance is conducted from afar, also because it seems impossible to get into Wallace’s home. There are some tombs near it, and one of them is really strange.

Enoch Wallace’s real job is to run a way station on behalf of an interstellar community made up of a lot of different species. In a century of service, he has learned a lot from contacts with aliens and fears that this may end because of the government’s interest.

The novel “The Scarab Mission” by James L. Cambias was published for the first time in 2023. It’s the second book in The Billion Worlds series.

The starship Yanai has a contract to send the abandoned Safdaghar habitat into a new orbit where its new owners can recycle its components. There’s a small crew on board, and Solana leads the others into the habitat in search of valuable objects.

The team has a few days to explore the habitat, where artists lived and created unique objects that could be of considerable value to collectors. The situation they find there, with dead bodies and vast damage, indicates that something very bad happened. The arrival of another team in search of something valuable further complicates the situation.