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Roadside Picnic

Arkady Strugatsky

Start date: July 1, 2015

Finish date: July 30, 2015

Discussion: Book Discussions

Discussion leader: Andreas

Why we're reading this: Group Classic Novel discussion topic July 2015
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What Members Thought

Jan 19, 2016 Carlex rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Gran clásico. Impresionante y a momentos deprimente. Muy ruso todo ;-) Me deja con ganas de más de los hermanos Strugatsky y de más scifi rusa. No tiene desperdicio el prólogo de la gran Úrsula K LeGuin y tampoco el comentario de Boris Strugatsky sobre los problemas con la censura.

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Jun 24, 2015 Bobby Bermea rated it really liked it

Shelves: visions-of-tomorrow

For me, this book is what a site like Goodreads is all about. I love science fiction but I had never heard of this book or these guys. The science fiction group had this for a read of the month and I couldn't read it that month, but I remembered it sounded interesting, so when it showed up in my holds at the library, I read it with some anticipation.

What a find! Super interesting premise that I hadn't run into before. What if aliens came down to earth and simply didn't care about human beings o For me, this book is what a site like Goodreads is all about. I love science fiction but I had never heard of this book or these guys. The science fiction group had this for a read of the month and I couldn't read it that month, but I remembered it sounded interesting, so when it showed up in my holds at the library, I read it with some anticipation.

What a find! Super interesting premise that I hadn't run into before. What if aliens came down to earth and simply didn't care about human beings one way or another? And then left, leaving their various alien detritus around for human beings to try and make their stumbling way through? Both the fact of the mysterious technology and the fact of the extraterrestrial indifference have a profound, morally crippling affect on the poor terrans left behind. A black market grows up around the alien trash, the remains of a celestial "roadside picnic" and our hero, such as he is, becomes one of the more proficient procurers of said black market materials.

It's a hard story about hard people making tough choices in a difficult environment. Red Schuhart, almost in spite of himself, finds a smoldering piece of humanity deep in the fire pit of his soul that eventually -- well, I don't want to give away anything.

But it's a tightly conceptualized, fully conceived, rather dark take on the idea of contact with an intelligent alien species. Here, the encounter with the extraterrestrial is the polar opposite of the encounter in, say, 2001: A Space Odyssey. There, the aliens take an avid interest and are the agents of our evolution into godhood; here, the aliens couldn't care less and casually leave behind the means of our destruction.

So why not five stars? Well, only so many books should get five stars, right? And whereas I'd be hard pressed to find a flaw with this book I also didn't have that complete, absorbed rapture that I've had with other books that I thought were truly great. Honestly, it might have to do entirely to do with the fact that I'm getting older, and I like a little more light in my view of the world. But I can still appreciate tremendous craft when I see it.

This story came out of Russia in the early Seventies. Shows you that the growing nihilism and cynicism towards the noble ideals of the Sixties wasn't just an American thing. ...more

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Jun 24, 2015 Anne Marie rated it really liked it

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. This was a very interesting, albeit strange book. I would say that I did enjoy it, although the characters were not at all relate-able. There were some very interesting and engaging passages that really stuck with me. Foremost was the discussion between Valentine Pillman and Richard Noonan on defining intelligence:

"We usually proceed from a trivial definition: intelligence is the attribute of man that separates his activity from that of animals. It's a kind of attempt to distinguish the master ...more

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Jun 20, 2019 Sean DeLauder rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: harry-sf-book-club

Fascinating in its realism. What would contact with humanity and a spacefaring civilization, a civilization so advanced it could traverse the stars where we tentatively reach toward other planets with a moderate rate of success, be like? Would there even be contact or would humans be left with the remnants of an indifferent alien passerby? The Strugatsky brothers reckoned the latter, leaving humanity to pick through the debris of a visitation whose very intention is beyond understanding.

As one m Fascinating in its realism. What would contact with humanity and a spacefaring civilization, a civilization so advanced it could traverse the stars where we tentatively reach toward other planets with a moderate rate of success, be like? Would there even be contact or would humans be left with the remnants of an indifferent alien passerby? The Strugatsky brothers reckoned the latter, leaving humanity to pick through the debris of a visitation whose very intention is beyond understanding.

As one might expect, humanity can make almost no sense of what it finds, occasionally divining the properties of one item or another while acknowledging this is probably not the intent of the object. The environment(s) where the aliens made contact, the Zone, and much of the material found within it are toxic, and frighteningly so. Hazards can be invisible and violently lethal.

All of this makes complete sense. Would someone from the 19th century have any idea how to operate a cellular phone? How much more difficult to solve this mystery if it were turned off? There would be no instructions. No cellular or wireless network to connect to. The interior would be filled with a variety of toxic substances. Someone would figure out how to turn it on using a side button, but that would only last a day or so before the battery ran out, or perhaps the batteries were exhausted and its only function was the slow decay of its dangerous parts. What would a person make of the apps and other features? Even this example comes with the understanding the device had been crafted by humans for humans using a language understood by humans. Alien technology would offer no such parallels.

The Zone poisons or melts people. There are strange "traps" that crush them. Children have bizarre mutations. The dead begin inexplicably rising. There's even a device that purportedly grants wishes. All technology that is utterly beyond human understanding but completely fits within Arthur C. Clarke's axiom about the differentiation in levels of technology.

The general plot touches upon the inscrutable nature of these devices as well as what the visitation means, the most realistic if also the most disappointing to the "xenologists" is that aliens were just passing through, completely oblivious to the presence of a sentient species on Earth, heaving their garbage out the window and departing in a plume of toxic exhaust.

In the end, after the passage of a decade or so, we're not much improved from where we were, apart from the deaths of almost everyone who has entered the Zone. We've created a handful of new technologies, though we don't understand how they work, and the Zone remains an enigma. For the most part humanity remains unchanged. There is no catharsis from this oblique alien contact.

Earth is a place to stretch your legs and throw away the fast food from the last break in the drive, given no more thought than any interstate rest area. It's a realism uncommon to science fiction in an era of space opera, probably because it's so distressingly anticlimactic and diminishes the value of humanity sensitive to its value in the incomprehensibly vast universe. Given that same vastness, however, and until we contact a sentient species from another world that proves otherwise, it's also a far more likely depiction. ...more

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