Roadside Picnic

by Arkady Strugatsky

Science fiction lends itself readily to imaginative subversion of any status quo.

What matters is that we now know for sure: humanity is not alone in the universe. I’m afraid the Institute of Extraterrestrial Cultures could never make a more fundamental discovery.

That’s the stalker’s second commandment: it has to be clear for a hundred paces either to your left or to your right.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “You can’t always take the straight path.”

What’s so great about your Europe? The eternal boredom? You work all day, watch TV all night; when that’s done, you’re off to bed with some bitch, breeding delinquents. The strikes, the demonstrations, the never-ending politics . . . To hell with your Europe!”

Redrick couldn’t resist it and stroked her back, covered in warm golden fur, and for the hundredth time marveled at how silky and long it was.

Redrick carefully hugged the warm creature crawling all over him, looked into the huge, entirely black eyes with no whites, pressed his face to the chubby little cheek covered in silky golden fur, and repeated, “My Monkey . . . Oh, you Monkey . . . What a little Monkey . . .”

The air turned hard, it appeared to have surfaces, corners, edges, as if space had been filled with huge coarse spheres, polished pyramids, and gigantic prickly crystals, and he was forced to make his way through all this, as if in a dream, pushing through a dark antique shop full of ancient misshapen furniture . . .

Well, he’s not a corpse for nothing.”

Unease and tension is met with braggadocio or disbelief. Something is terribly wrong with the world, and only the profiteers are dong something about it.

Yes, the children Burbridge had wished up in the Zone were magnificent.

“The risen dead have no place to return,” he enunciated, “and that is why they’re sorrowful and stern.”

And now you can’t even remember how all this unanimous steely resolve suddenly evaporated into thin air. On the one hand, we are forced to admit, on the other hand, we can’t dispute.

The problem is we don’t notice the years pass, he thought. Screw the years—we don’t notice things change. We know that things change, we’ve been told since childhood that things change, we’ve witnessed things change ourselves many a time, and yet we’re still utterly incapable of noticing the moment that change comes—or we search for change in all the wrong places.

My God, he thought, we can’t do a thing! We can’t stop it, we can’t slow it down! No force in the world could contain this blight, he thought in horror. It’s not because we do bad work. And it’s not because they are more clever and cunning than we are. The world is just like that. Man is like that. If it wasn’t the Visit, it would have been something else. Pigs can always find mud.

Humanity as a whole is too stable a system, nothing upsets it.”

Xenology is an unnatural mixture of science fiction and formal logic. At its core is a flawed assumption—that an alien race would be psychologically human.”

intelligence is the ability of a living creature to perform pointless or unnatural acts.”

Intelligence is the ability to harness the powers of the surrounding world without destroying the said world.”

The God hypothesis, for example, allows you to have an unparalleled understanding of absolutely everything while knowing absolutely nothing

“I get it,” said Noonan. “A roadside picnic.” “Exactly. A picnic by the side of some space road. And you ask me whether they’ll come back . . .”

‘You ask: what makes man great?’” he quoted. “‘Is it that he re-created nature? That he harnessed forces of almost-cosmic proportions? That in a brief time he has conquered the planet and opened a window onto the universe? No! It is that despite all this, he has survived, and intends to continue doing so.’”

There are a number of objects for which we have found applications. We use them, although almost certainly not in the ways that the aliens intended. I’m absolutely convinced that in the vast majority of cases we’re using sledgehammers to crack nuts.

They should be even more scared than the rest of us ordinary folks put together. Because we merely don’t understand a thing, but they at least understand how much they don’t understand.

He was right about that: mankind’s most impressive achievement is that it has survived and intends to continue doing so.

“All the same, you shouldn’t despair,” said Noonan. “There’s nothing in the world that can’t be fixed.

There's wisdom from the long, inconclusive convo about intelligence.

No, the money’s not the issue. That those bastards, Raspy and Bony, would get their hands on the goods? Yes, that’s something. That would be too bad. But what are they to me? Either way they eventually get everything .

At a certain point, the money isn't the issue -- perhaps it never was -- but the competitiveness is? Desire to beat the other bastards to the punch?

Redrick also looked around.

Narrative shifts from first to third person, even within the same Graf. Ups the ante on confusion

So what do we conclude? We conclude that I’m actually a good man.

There are too many of them, vultures, that’s why there are no clean places left, the whole world is filthy

It was once said, and very rightly, that a man who is well brought-up may read anything. The only people who boggle at what is perfectly natural are those who are the worst swine and the finest experts in filth. In their utterly contemptible pseudo-morality they ignore the contents and madly attack individual words.