Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky Cosmic picnics and the ants that fight over the leftovers (Review by Rupert Neethling, Cape Town, South Africa) There is a freshness to these two
brothers' books that has not dissipated even decades later. One of the reasons for this
may be that Boris's training was in astrophysics and computers, while Arkady's was in
Japanese literature - clearly a fruitful combination. But the other reason is perhap Different, often more thought-provoking and, well, more literary. Writers in the erstwhile Soviet bloc were apparently not shackled by the idea that they were working within a self-ghettoized subgenre called Science Fiction. They set out to produce literature. And it shows. Indeed, hack writers in the West can still learn from older novels like Roadside Picnic. This is a short novel; disciplined, deep, tense, passionate, and almost off-handedly harrowing. The main character, Redrick Schuhart, is a fighter. Not only in bar-rooms, but also in his approach to life. He is undereducated and knows it; but he is also proud and hell-bent on making his life count. When the Earth is "Visited" in six Zones by extraterrestrials who depart almost instantly thereafter, leaving behind unidentifiable but deadly artifacts, Redrick is among the first to try and make a quick buck by becoming a stalker. Stalkers, at the risk of their lives,
sneak into the guarded Zones illegally with the aim of returning with some of these
strange artifacts in order to sell them to scientists and "military
industrialists", i.e. weapons researchers. Because of his uncanny sense for danger
and his extreme focus on staying alive, Redrick is one of the few stalkers to make more
than one, ill-fated trip to a Zone which, beside the armed guards on its perimeters,
offers lethal perils of its own. But as the years pass and the few successful stalkers Redrick had known are all claimed by the Zone, leaving the field open for a successive stream of young and soon-to-be-dead new stalkers; and as his own ventures into the Zone leave ever-deeper scars on his body, his mind and his family, he begins to lose heart. It becomes increasingly clear to him that he is an ill-used pawn, frequently jailed and less-frequently well-paid, by a humanity that cares only for gain and treads with relish on the weak. And it is at this point that Roadside Picnic produces something the best SF dealing with alien encounters seeks to convey: that in interacting with the alien, human beings are given the opportunity to discover themselves. It is up to us what we make of that discovery. And for Redrick Schuhart, who has spent his life wresting what he could from the "sons of bitches" who would deny him everything including his life, his discovery becomes a blazing desire: "HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!" Translator: Antonina W. Bouis
Explorations will be updated regularly.
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s more relevant:
Russian SF and Eastern European SF (that of Stanislav Lem, for example) is so obviously
different from much of the work produced in the West.
