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Roadside Picnic (16) (Rediscovered Classics) Paperback – May 1, 2012
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Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those young rebels who are compelled, in spite of extreme danger, to venture illegally into the Zone to collect the mysterious artifacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the place and the thriving black market in the alien products. But when he and his friend Kirill go into the Zone together to pick up a “full empty,” something goes wrong. And the news he gets from his girlfriend upon his return makes it inevitable that he’ll keep going back to the Zone, again and again, until he finds the answer to all his problems.
First published in 1972, Roadside Picnic is still widely regarded as one of the greatest science fiction novels, despite the fact that it has been out of print in the United States for almost thirty years. This authoritative new translation corrects many errors and omissions and has been supplemented with a foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin and a new afterword by Boris Strugatsky explaining the strange history of the novel’s publication in Russia.
- Print length224 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherChicago Review Press
- Publication dateMay 1, 2012
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.6 x 8.5 inches
- ISBN-101613743416
- ISBN-13978-1613743416
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"The story is carried out with a controlled fierceness that doesn't waver for a minute." —Kirkus Reviews
"Brilliantly and beautifully written . . . a truly superb work of science fiction." —Infinity Plus
"Lively, racy, and likable . . . complex in event, imaginative in detail, ethically and intellectually sophisticated." —Ursula K. Le Guin
"Amazing. . . . The Strugatskys' deft and supple handling of loyalty and greed, of friendship and love, of despair and frustration and loneliness [produces] a truly superb tale. . . . You won't forget it." —Theodore Sturgeon
"No doubt: a powerful, classic work of science fiction. Certainly recommended." —The Complete Review
"If you're going to read just one Soviet-era Russian science fiction novel, it should be Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's dark, ambiguous Roadside Picnic." —io9
"The Strugatskys' worldview remains both uniquely cutting and replete with humanity . . . The characters' conflicted views of their troubled world make for a read that still feels fresh today. It's also a book that's bound to make you feel a little less sure of humanity's place in the universe." —Discover
“Go read Roadside Picnic. It’s a phenomenal book.” —SF Signal
"[T]his is a fantastic book. One of my favorite recommendations of the year." —Boing Boing
About the Author
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are the most famous and popular Russian writers of science fiction, and the authors of over 25 novels and novellas. Their books have been widely translated and have been made into a number of films. Arkady Strugatsky died in 1991. Boris Strugatsky died in November 2012. Ursula K. Le Guin is the author of A Wizard of Earthsea, The Left Hand of Darkness, and other science-fiction classics.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ROADSIDE PICNIC
By ARKADY STRUGATSKY BORIS STRUGATSKYCHICAGO REVIEW PRESS
Copyright © 1972 Arkady and Boris StrugatskyAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61374-341-6
Chapter One
REDRICK SCHUHART, 23 YEARS OLD, SINGLE, LABORATORY ASSISTANT IN THE HARMONT BRANCH OF THE INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE OF EXTRATERRESTRIAL CULTURES.The other day, we're standing in the repository; it's evening already, nothing left to do but dump the lab suits, then I can head down to the Borscht for my daily dose of booze. I'm relaxing, leaning on the wall, my work all done and a cigarette at the ready, dying for a smoke—I haven't smoked for two hours—while he keeps fiddling with his treasures. One safe is loaded, locked, and sealed shut, and he's loading yet another one—taking the empties from our transporter, inspecting each one from every angle (and they are heavy bastards, by the way, fourteen pounds each), and, grunting slightly, carefully depositing them on the shelf.
He's been struggling with these empties for ages, and all, in my opinion, with no benefit to humanity or himself. In his place, I would have bailed a long time ago and gotten another job with the same pay. Although on the other hand, if you think about it, an empty really is a puzzling and even a mysterious thing. I've handled them lots of times myself, but every time I see one—I can't help it, I'm still amazed. It's just these two copper disks the size of a saucer, a quarter inch thick, about eighteen inches apart, and not a thing between the two. I mean, nothing whatsoever, zip, nada, zilch. You can stick your hand between them—maybe even your head, if the thing has unhinged you enough—nothing but empty space, thin air. And despite this, there must be something there, a force field of some sort, because so far no one's managed to push these disks together, or pull them apart either.
No, friends, it's hard to describe this thing if you haven't seen one. It looks much too simple, especially when you finally convince yourself that your eyes aren't playing tricks on you. It's like describing a glass to someone or, God forbid, a wineglass: you just wiggle your fingers in the air and curse in utter frustration. All right, we'll assume that you got it, and if you didn't, pick up a copy of the Institute's Reports—they have articles about these empties in every issue, complete with pictures.
Anyway, Kirill's been struggling with these empties for almost a year now. I've worked for him from the very beginning, but I still don't get what he wants with them, and to be honest, I haven't tried too hard to find out. Let him first figure it out for himself, sort it all out, then maybe I'll have a listen. But so far, one thing is clear to me: he's absolutely determined to dismantle an empty, dissolve it in acid, crush it under a press, or melt it in an oven. And then he'll finally get it, he'll be covered in glory, and the entire scientific world will simply shudder in pleasure. But for now, as far as I know, he's nowhere near this goal. He hasn't yet accomplished anything at all, except that he's exhausted himself, turned gray and quiet, and his eyes have become like a sick dog's—they even water. If it were someone else, I'd get him totally wasted, take him to a great girl to loosen him up a bit, then the next morning I'd feed him more booze, take him to more girls, and by the end of the week he'd be A-OK—good as new and ready to go. Except this sort of therapy wouldn't work on Kirill. There's no point in even suggesting it; he's not the type.
So, as I said, we're standing in the repository, I'm looking at him, the way he's gotten, how his eyes have sunk in, and I feel sorrier for him than I can say. And then I decide. Except I don't really decide—it's like the words tumble out themselves.
"Listen," I say, "Kirill ..."
He's standing there, holding up the last empty, and looking like he wants to crawl right inside it.
"Listen," I say, "Kirill. What if you had a full empty, huh?"
"A full empty?" he repeats, knitting his brows like I'm speaking Greek.
"Yeah," I say. "It's your hydromagnetic trap, what's it called? Object seventy-seven B. Only with some shit inside, blue stuff."
I can tell—I'm starting to get through. He looks up at me, squints, and there in his eyes, behind the dog tears, appears a glimmer of intelligence, as he himself loves to put it. "Wait, wait," he says. "A full one? The same thing, except full?"
"Yes, exactly."
"Where?"
My Kirill's cured. Good as new and ready to go. "Let's go have a smoke," I say.
He promptly stuffs the empty into the safe, slams the door, gives the lock three and a half turns, and comes back with me to the lab. For an empty empty, Ernest would give four hundred bucks in cash, and I could bleed the bastard dry for a full one; but believe it or not, that doesn't even cross my mind, because in my hands Kirill has come to life again—he's buzzing with energy, almost bursting into song, bounding down the stairs four at a time, not letting a guy light his cigarette. Anyway, I tell him everything: what it looks like and where it is and how to best get at it. He immediately takes out a map, finds this garage, puts his finger on it, gives me a long look, and, of course, immediately figures me out, but then that isn't so hard ...
"You devil, Red!" he says, smiling at me. "Well, let's get this over with. We'll go first thing tomorrow morning. I'll request a hoverboot and a pass at nine, and by ten we'll be off. All right?"
"All right," I say. "And who else will we take?"
"What do we need another guy for?"
"No way," I say. "This is no picnic. What if something happens to you? It's the Zone. Gotta follow the rules."
He gives a short laugh and shrugs. "Up to you. You know better."
No shit! Of course, that was him being generous: Who needs another guy, we'll go by ourselves, we'll keep the whole thing dark, and no one will suspect a thing. Except I know that the guys from the Institute don't go into the Zone in pairs. They have an unwritten rule around here: two guys do all the work while the third one watches, and when they ask later, he vouches there was no funny business.
"If it were up to me, I'd take Austin," Kirill says. "But you probably don't want him. Or would he do?"
"No," I say. "Anyone but him. You'll take Austin another time." Austin isn't a bad guy, he's got the right mix of courage and cowardice, but I think he's already doomed. You can't explain this to Kirill, but I know these things: the man has decided he's got the Zone completely figured out, and so he'll soon screw up and kick the bucket. And he can go right ahead. But not with me around.
"All right, all right," says Kirill. "How about Tender?" Tender is his second lab assistant. He isn't a bad guy, a calm sort.
"He's a bit old," I say. "And he has kids ..."
"That's OK. He's been in the Zone already."
"Fine," I say. "Let it be Tender."
Anyway, he stays there poring over the map while I race straight to the Borscht, because my stomach is growling and my throat is parched.
The next day I get to work at nine, as usual, and show my ID. The guard on duty is the beefy sergeant I pummeled last year when he made a drunken pass at Guta. "Hey," he says. "They're looking all over the Institute for you, Red—"
I interrupt him politely. "I'm not 'Red' to you," I say. "Don't you try to pal around with me, you Swedish ape."
"For God's sake, Red!" he says in astonishment. "But they all call you that!"
I'm anxious about going into the Zone and cold sober to boot. I grab him by the shoulder belt and tell him exactly what he is and just how his mother conceived him. He spits on the floor, returns my ID, and continues without any more pleasantries.
"Redrick Schuhart," he says, "you are ordered to immediately report to the chief of security, Captain Herzog."
"There you go," I say. "Much better. Keep plugging away, Sergeant—you'll make lieutenant yet."
Meantime, I'm shitting my pants. What could Captain Herzog want from me during work hours? Well, off I go to report. He has an office on the third floor, a very nice office, complete with bars on the windows like a police station. Willy himself is sitting behind his desk, puffing on his pipe and typing some gibberish on his typewriter. Over in the corner, some sergeant is rummaging through a metal cabinet—must be a new guy; I've never met him. We have more of these sergeants at the Institute than they have at division headquarters, all of them hale, hearty, and rosy cheeked. They don't need to go into the Zone and don't give a damn about world affairs.
"Hello," I say. "You requested my presence?"
Willy looks at me like I'm not there, pushes away his typewriter, puts an enormous file in front of him, and starts flipping through it. "Redrick Schuhart?" he says.
"That's my name," I answer, feeling an urge to burst into nervous laughter.
"How long have you worked at the Institute?"
"Two years, going on the third."
"Your family?"
"I'm all alone," I say. "An orphan."
Then he turns to the sergeant and orders him sternly, "Sergeant Lummer, go to the archives and bring back case 150." The sergeant salutes him and beats it. Willy slams the file shut and asks me gloomily, "Starting up your old tricks again, are you?"
"What old tricks?"
"You know damn well what old tricks. We've received information on you again."
Aha, I think. "And who was the source?"
He scowls and bangs his pipe on the ashtray in annoyance. "That's none of your business," he says. "I'm warning you as an old friend: give up this nonsense, give it up for good. If they catch you a second time, you won't walk away with six months. And they'll kick you out of the Institute once and for all, understand?"
"I understand," I say. "That much I understand. What I don't understand is what son of a bitch squealed on me ..."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from ROADSIDE PICNICby ARKADY STRUGATSKY BORIS STRUGATSKY Copyright © 1972 by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Excerpted by permission of CHICAGO REVIEW PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : Chicago Review Press; Reprint edition (May 1, 2012)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 224 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1613743416
- ISBN-13 : 978-1613743416
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.6 x 8.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #7,878 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #95 in Hard Science Fiction (Books)
- #184 in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction (Books)
- #407 in Science Fiction Adventures
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But what exactly are these leftovers? What was their original purpose? Study them though they might, the scientists have only barely begun to understand anything about these objects. "I'm absolutely convinced that in the vast majority of cases we're using sledgehammers to crack nuts," says a scientist at one point, illustrating how infuriating and bewildering it is to be so close to mind-expanding technology, but unable to know anything about it.
And that all goes double for the Zone, a bizarre, nightmarish area whose outward normality belies bizarre rules, deadly traps, bending gravity, and more. These are areas in which normal rules no longer apply, where the very rules of science seem to no longer hold true. But why are these Zones here? Are they testing us? Are they windows into a larger world? Or, as the same scientist says, are they simply the refuse and trash of aliens who stopped for a roadside picnic on our earth, and saw us as ants and animals - not even worth speaking to?
That's a bleak philosophical backdrop to a novel, but seems fitting for a novel written in 1972 Russia - after all, this is a culture known for its weary, laughing acceptance of all the cruelties of life, and Roadside Picnic is no different, American setting or not. Whether the book is a critique of the Russian system or an allegory for the corruption of capitalism or simply a science fiction story, I leave for each reader to decide for themselves; yes, there's a long history of censorship of the novel, but as Boris Strugatsky explains in the fascinating afterword, it was never quite clear exactly what was wrong with the novel, other than maybe its tone. But whatever the deeper meaning, Roadside Picnic ultimately feels like humanity coming to terms with its own insignificance, and trying to make peace with what that says about us. Are we just base animals, scrabbling for money and self-interest? Could we be more than that?
All of this makes Roadside Picnic sound existential and crushing, I know; indeed, if you've seen Andrei Tarkovsky's film version of the novel, Stalker, you might expect something weighty and heady like that. Instead, Roadside Picnic is remarkably down-to-earth, engaging with its ideas through drunken conversations and private musings, all while living through its primary lead, a stalker named Red whose incursions into the Zone are tense, unnerving, and unsettling, all without much ever truly happening. Indeed, one of the things that makes Roadside Picnic so effective is the way it suggests so much without ever explaining anything, allowing the reader's mind to fill in the gaps of this world around the edges, while giving us an interesting, relatable, down-to-earth character we can empathize with. After all, all Red wants is to provide for his family, and exploring the Zone is what he's good at.
I'm not wild about the ending of the novel in some ways, which seems like it comes from a different story entirely, eschewing the more existential and weirdly practical questions of the rest of the book for a quest for a mythical object which may or may not exist, but demands much. There's something fascinating about where the Strugatskys choose to end the novel, though, which ties into that larger question of what exactly we are as a human race, and whether we truly can overcome our limitations. It's a compelling ending, even if I'm not sold on the way we get there.
But even with that, it's hard to really convey how much this strange, slight novel will stick with you, informing how you see the world and creating a haunting, grim world that you'll think about for a long time after you finish the pages. Its ideas, its worldbuilding, its imagination, and its characters all live and breathe, giving you a novel whose ambitions and ideas linger beautifully and whose classic status is justly deserved.
The setting takes place in the aftermath of an extraterrestrial event called "The Visitation" that took place in several locations around the Earth, simultaneously, over a two-day period. Neither the Visitors themselves nor their means of arrival or departure were ever seen by the local populations who lived inside the relatively small areas, each a few square kilometers, of the six Visitation Zones. The zones exhibit strange and dangerous phenomena not understood by humans, and contain artifacts with inexplicable properties. In the wake of this phenomenon, individuals known as "stalkers" regularly enter the Zones illegally at night in search of valuable artifacts for profit. The main story revolves around one such Stalker named Redrick Schuhart (or "Red" for short), who is highly skilled and one of the few to survive multiple trips to the Zone. We're taken through a decade of his life as he tries to make a profit off the trinkets he retrieves from the Zone, raises his young daughter who was born severely mutated due to Red carrying strange after-effects from his trips in the alien sector, repeatedly dodging the authorities, and his quest to find 'the golden sphere'---an alien object rumored to grant wishes. And through it all, the reader will be left to wonder; are these alien objects worth dying over? Or are there some mysteries best left unsolved?
It's really interesting to read a non-American sci-fi novel and see an alien visitation from another country's perspective (in this case, Russia). (Because let's face it, why are there so many stories where the aliens conveniently touch down in a major, U.S. city?) Here, we get the far more plausible and realistic take of the main events transpiring in what was once a sleepy, small town-turned-upside down by extraterrestrials destroying most of it. We get to see everyone's reactions to the aliens in an up close and personal way. Some residents flee the town, while others stubbornly stay behind. Everyone has their theories as to why the aliens visited, and all of it remains speculation with nothing fully confirmed. The best sequence in the book, arguably, is when a prominent scientist poses his theory that the aliens are so far advanced that they didn't even notice us humans---the way people settle down for a picnic while giving no mind to the insects in the grass---and then left their "trash" behind when they vanished. To us, the alien trinkets are valuable, advanced technology....but to the aliens, it could turn out to be nothing more than the equivalent of candy wrappers and spare change. It's such an interesting take on extraterrestrial encounters that's so rarely used in fiction, with most stories sticking closer to the traditional adventures you see in "Star Trek" or "Star Wars".
Through Redrick's eyes, we see what happens when a man is driven to desperation to support his family, and what started off as an exciting way to make a quick buck slowly erodes into bleak survival against a government that'll ditch their lackeys at the drop of a hat when they're no longer useful, and a universe that doesn't seem to care about the affairs of humans. Redrick goes through a tragic arc of beginning off as a strong-willed, cocky master thief who makes a living off of stealing artifacts from the Zone, but still genuinely caring about the safety of the partners he brings along. But as the years go by and his family and living situation worsen (with the reanimated corpse of his dead father roaming around the house and his daughter slowly devolving into a monkey), Redrick becomes singularly focused on turning a profit by any means necessary; seeing his assistants as nothing but tools to be discarded when they're no longer useful. The story ends rather abruptly and open-endedly, with the reader left to wonder whether Redrick met an untimely fate, or if he finally got what he was searching for.....and if he did, was the effort worth it?
Admittedly, certain sections can get rather dull, and the old style of writing takes some getting used to. I had to re-read more than a few sections just to understand what was going on, and while I don't mind the intellectual challenge, I know that won't be everyone's cup of tea. It puts into perspective how we, as humans, are tiny specks in the greater galaxy....but that doesn't mean we aren't important and aren't worth anything. I fully recognize the good writing and the impact this mini-anthology had on science fiction as a whole. But the whole book is so grungy and bleak that this is definitely something you kind of have to mentally prepare yourself for. Much like my experiences with "The Martian Chronicles" and "Something Wicked This Way Comes", this is a book that I respect more than I like.
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En resumen: no sabrás por qué pasa lo que pasa, pero sí cómo actúan en consecuencia los personajes. Una gran historia muy recomendable, el final no me terminó de gustar, pero tal vez fui yo quien no lo comprendió o algo, vale la pena darle la oportunidad










