I am ashamed by how long it took me to read Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic. It’s one of those books that everyone always talks about, but I’ve never met anyone who has actually read it. I know many people who have studied the Andrei Tarkovsky film, Stalker, but never bothered to seek out the source material. For the first time, I really feel like a book lived up to the hype. It’s hard not to see just how influential Roadside Picnic has been on a lot of modern sci-fi.
The SF Masterworks edition of Roadside Picnic has a foreword by Ursula Le Guin, an excellent read in and of itself. She praises the novel for being about regular people rather than about the overwhelming politics and intrigue that many “space operas” tend to lean toward. It was one of the reasons I loved Becky Chambers’ A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. It wasn’t about huge galactic events. It was about the people who are often forgotten.
Roadside Picnic doesn’t hold your hand. There aren’t any easy explanations and no worldbuilding for the alien species. Our characters don’t know what the debris the visitors left behind is all about, and so, neither do we. It’s a novel that is more about the things we don’t know and have no hope of understanding than it is about the alien visitation itself. It’s incredibly thought-provoking in that way. Humans consider ourselves incredibly important – we imagine that alien visitations would be about first contact and communication. How would the human race deal with the fact that we might be so insignificant in the grand scheme of things that alien visitors would completely ignore us? It also made me wonder how much of the narrative we experience is cultural to the particular zone in Harmont (an un-named, but assumed town in Canada)? Do zones in other countries have stalkers and black markets? What kind of developments and co-operations might be happening outside of the tiny sphere of Harmont’s Institute?
There are some minor things to criticize Roadside Picnic for, but some are a direct product of the time it was written. There are virtually no female characters in this novel, and the ones that do exist are only in relation to the male protagonists; wives, mothers, daughters, sex objects etc. I also would have liked a bit more development of Red’s relationship with his daughter and see the experience of the children of stalkers who were born with mutations. After all, if we’re approaching a book from the ordinary and the marginalized point of view, then it would have been nice for those children to have a voice. I also felt that the end was a little rushed. Red is faced with a moral choice, but the revelation of his motives happened far too quickly, so it felt a bit jarring as the plot drew to a close.
Ultimately, Roadside Picnic takes a rather bleak view of humanity. There is very little of beauty in the Strugatsky’s world and even things described in ways that could be beautiful simmer with either an undercurrent of danger or sadness. It’s actually quite nihilistic, without being on-the-nose about it, which I found surprisingly refreshing! Roadside Picnic raises a lot of questions, gives very few answers, and makes the reader question the human condition and our very place in the universe. It really is an excellent piece of Science Fiction.