Roadside Picnic
Arkady & Boris Strugatsky
357 pages
published in 1971
An alien visit leaves the small town of Harmont littered with dangerous, enigmatic artifacts and the laws of physics strangely altered. Evacuated and isolated, the Zone around Harmont is studied by the Institute for Instellar Cultures and guarded by the army and police, but that doesn’t stop adventures or desperate men and women from sneaking into the Zone, to try and smuggle out some of the treasures littering the Zone. They call those people Stalkers and Redrick Shuhart is one of them, somebody who can make a quick three-four hundred bucks just bringing out one of the empties –two copper discs 18 inches apart held together by something — that can be found anywhere in the Zone.
If all of this sounds vaguely familiar it’s because Roadside Picnic functioned as the inspiration for the brilliant Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker, which in turn functioned as inspiration for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of videogames, which transfered the Zone to Chernobil (and in art inspiring real life, those people making a living from visiting the Chernobil exclusion zone, also call themselves stalkers). Reading this novel with that knowledge in the back of my head, it did read like a videogame at times, especially in the sections set in the Zone.
Roadside Picnic consists of four sections, after a short introduction in which the concept of the Zones is established, all dealing with Red’s continuing evolution as a Stalker. In the first section he’s still working for the International Institute, as well as moonlighting as a freelancer. When he goes on a sanctioned expedition as a favour for a friend, a chance encounter leads to the death of this friend after they’d already left the Zone, which Red blames himself for. Meanwhile he’s gotten his girlfriend Guta pregnant and although they fear the possible mutations that could result from Red’s visits to the Zone, they decide to keep the baby.
The next section sees Red as a full time Stalker, to provide for his family. One expedition results in a disaster as his companion, Buzzard Burbridge, steps in a trap of witch jelly, which dissolves his legs, needing amputation. Red gets Buzzard to a surgeon, but later on is arrested, escapes and tells the client for whom he undertook the expedition where to find a sample of the same witch jelly that almost killed his friend. He feels he has no choice but to do so, no matter the consequences, to be able to provide for his family, his wife and daughter.
His daughter turns out to have picked up a mutation from the Zone, being hairy all over and progressively living up more to her nickname, Monkey. All this is shown in the third section, which also sees Red’s dead father coming back to life and living with them, not an uncommon occurrence in Harmont. Meanwhile Red’s friend Richard Noonan is trying to discover who exactly is still smuggling out artifacts from the Zone, when all known Stalkers have been made harmless.
The climax comes in the fourth section, as Red goes for one last expedition into the Zone, together with the son of Buzzard, to find a legendary artifact, a Golden Globe supposedly able to grant wishes. Red knows the son is only there to spring the trap guarding the globe and once he’s dead there’s nothing standing between Red and his dearest wish, if he knew what that was. All through the story he’s been driven to increasingly worse behaviour to keep his wife and daughter safe, but now all he can think of as a wish is what his companion was shouting when killed by the meatgrinder trap: “HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND LET NO ONE GO AWAY UNSATISFIED”.
The nature of the alien visit and what they left behind in the Zones is never quite explained, except through the hypotheses of Dr. Valentine Pilman, who functions as the voice of authority in the novel. He first shows up in the introduction to discuss the Zones and where they came from:
“Imagine that you spin a huge globe and you start firing bullets into it. The bullet holes would lie on the surface in a smooth curve. The whole point (is that) all six Visitation Zones are situated on the surface of our planet as though someone had taken six shots at Earth from a pistol located somewhere along the Earth-Deneb line.”
Which is something he has gotten the credit for but which discovery wasn’t made by him, but by an unnamed schoolboy. Pilman shows up again in the third section, to explain why this alien visit wasn’t First Contact, but was just a picnic:
A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around… Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind… And of course, the usual mess—apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow.
All the gadgets, the miracle technology that came out of the Zones, appropriated through so much suffering, no more than garbage. But life changing garbage, that made a mockery of the attempts to quarantine and study the Zones as soon as the first useful gadget was smuggled out. The Strugatsky brothers take some pleasure in satirising the corruption and naked capitalism with which the Zones are soon riddled with, while also showing the effect it has on somebody like Red, who has no choice but to sell out to save his family. What comes out of the Zones is used for nothing much more uplifting than new consumer goods or better weapons of mass destruction, doesn’t change the realities of life under capitalism.
You could call Roadside Picnic something of an anti-science fiction novel therefore, going against the usual optimism in the genre with the idea that alien contact doesn’t have to be meaningful, could happen in terms we barely understand just as a roadside picnic is complete incomprehensible to the animals of the forest, an accident with no consequences to the aliens, but squabbled over out of greed and lust for power. It’s not a depressing novel though and the ambiguous ending leaves some hope that something better might come out of it.
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