Tale of the Troika
245 pages
English language
Published Jan. 1, 1977 by Macmillan.
Roadside Picnic is set 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. The title of the novel derives from an analogy proposed by the character Dr. Valentine Pilman, who compares the Visitation to a picnic.
I enjoyed this a lot. It's surprising the level of world building that's achieved here given the length. The chapters are long and few, and each one gives you something different to take away about the Zone, how it affects regular people, and how some have learned to take advantage of it.
This is a second Slovenian translation of Roadside Picnic and this time we got uncensored version of the book translated by the same translator. It has a very informative foreword which speaks about the fight that brothers Strugacky with the Soviet Union state bureaucracy to get this work published. What is really interested is that the censors in the end took out the bad language in the swear words. Roadside picnic is, according to the foreword, one of the few books that won the battle against censorship. The book is apolitical with slight anti-capitalist subtone so it is hard to imagine why it was not approved by the censors in the first place.
Regarding the book itself it is very gripping sci-fi thriller that questions what is humanity. It is almost at the top of my suggestion list.
Aliens visit earth and leave again, as if they were just stopping for a picnic along the way to somewhere more interesting. The people living near the visited sites (Zones) find all sorts of mysterious and often dangerous things left behind that shatter our concepts of physics and the possibilities of life. Scientists are no better off than anyone else tring to understand them. And that's the crux of it - when humans are so insignificant, so far away from understanding reality, there is really very little separating us. I've typed and deleted a few more things but felt like it cheapened the book's themes because ultimately I think they are affective rather than ideological. So I'll just keep them to myself.
Second read, the sense of absurdist normalcy around incomprehensible change drives every scene and is just gripping.
I'd seen Stalker and knew about the sobering alien visitation concept the book and the movie share, but I wasn't prepared for the fantastically vivid characterisation of a humanity at once hopeful, desperate and despairing personified by protagonist Redrick Schuhart who is every bit as energised and complex as Alfred Bester's Gully Foyle.
