Review- Roadside picnic

Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


In Roadside Picnic, aliens have visited earth, but didn't consider humans worthy of interaction, or perhaps didn't recognize them as intelligent lifeforms. Instead, they left behind 'visitation zones'- vast areas where technology has been abandoned. Whatever happened in the zones made them irradiated and inhospitable to life. At the start of the novel, the visitation zones have been cordoned off, and nearby towns occupied by military and scientific organizations.

Despite their best efforts, the purpose of the abandoned artifacts can only be hypothesized, and are commonly referred to by terms that express how little is known about them, such as 'hell slime'. Despite the danger, there is a thriving black market in items illicitly removed from the zone by 'stalkers'. One such stalker is the protagonist of the book- Redrick (Red), who is coarse and cynical, motivated by getting money for himself and his wife and daughter. He drinks heavily to cope with stress and is aggressive and prone to violence.

The central concept of the novel makes a lot of sense- any aliens with technology sufficiently advanced to reach earth would be many hundreds or even thousands of years more developed than current human societies, and may have a physiology enabling a higher level of sentience. Such a civilization may well not wish to interact with humans; they may simply have used the earth to dump rubbish, or, as the title of the book suggests, to have a picnic, following which, humans gathered around the remaining technology like ants around crumbs of food.

The centrality of Red to the narrative gives the book a strongly noir tone. No one can be trusted, heavy drinking is the only way to get through the day, there are no real relationships outside the family, people don't communicate much other than to give orders or to fight. If the aliens hadn't visited, one can imagine Red joining a mercenary army or dealing drugs. I've heard the novel being described as apolitical, but I think it has more of a conservative tone- nothing can be improved, humans can never really understand things, so the best one can do is look after one's own family by whatever means are available. It is a mood amenable to authoritarian regimes, meaning that in one sense, it is surprising that the novel had such difficulty getting past the Soviet sensors.

Roadside picnic is a very good book- the length is about right, as Red is probably too limited a character for it to be much longer. The writing is terse, and the sequences in the zone- the heart of the book- are evocative and tense. More could have been done with the ideas central to the novel, which would have required a greater range of characters, but as it is the novel has both an interesting backdrop and skillful writing.



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