Roadside Picnic


Roadside Picnic is a science fiction novel by Soviet-Russian authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, written in 1971 and published in 1972. It is the brothers' most popular and most widely translated novel outside the former Soviet Union. As of 2003, Boris Strugatsky has counted 55 publications of "Picnic" in 22 countries.
The story is published in English in a translation by Antonina W. Bouis. A preface to the first American edition was written by Theodore Sturgeon. Stanislaw Lem wrote an afterword to the German edition of 1977.
The term "stalker" became a part of the Russian language and according to the authors, became the most popular of their neologisms. In the book, a stalker is a person who breaks the prohibition, enters the Zone and takes out artifacts from it, which he sells as a living. In Russian, after Tarkovsky's film, the term acquired the meaning of a guide who navigates forbidden and uncharted territories; later on, fans of industrial tourism, especially those visiting abandoned sites and ghost towns, were also called stalkers.
The 1979 film Stalker, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, is loosely based on the novel, with a screenplay written by the Strugatsky brothers.

Plot introduction

Roadside Picnic is a work of fiction based on the aftermath of an extraterrestrial event called the Visitation that simultaneously took place in half a dozen separate locations around Earth 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, seemingly supernatural properties. The title of the novel derives from an analogy proposed by the character Dr. Valentine Pilman, who compares the Visitation to a picnic:
In this analogy, the nervous animals are the humans who venture forth after the Visitors have left, discovering items and anomalies that are ordinary to those who have discarded them, but incomprehensible or deadly to those who find them.
This explanation implies that the Visitors may not have paid any attention to, or even noticed, the human inhabitants of the planet during their visit, just as humans do not notice or pay attention to grasshoppers or ladybugs during a picnic. The artifacts and phenomena left behind by the Visitors in the Zones were garbage, discarded and forgotten, without any preconceived plan to advance or damage humanity. There is little chance that the Visitors will return again because for them it was a brief stop, for reasons unknown, on the way to their actual destination.

Plot

Background

The novel is set in a post-visitation world where there are now six zones known on Earth that are full of unexplained phenomena and where strange happenings have briefly occurred, assumed to have been visitations by aliens. Governments and the UN, fearful of unforeseen consequences, try to keep tight control over them to prevent leakage of artifacts from the Zones. A subculture of stalkers, scavengers who go into the zones to steal the artifacts for profit, has evolved around the zones. The novel is set in and around a specific zone in Harmont, a fictitious town in a fictitious country, and follows the protagonist over the course of eight years.

Introduction

The introduction is a live radio interview with Dr. Pilman who is credited with the discovery that the six Visitation Zones' locations were not random. He explains it so: "Imagine that you spin a huge globe and you start firing bullets into it. The bullet holes would lie on the surface in a smooth curve. The whole point all six Visitation Zones are situated on the surface of our planet as though someone had taken six shots at Earth from a pistol located somewhere along the Earth–Deneb line. Deneb is the alpha star in Cygnus."

Section 1

The story revolves around Redrick "Red" Schuhart, a tough and experienced young stalker who regularly enters the Zone illegally at night in search of valuable artifacts for profit. Trying to clean up his act, he becomes employed as a lab assistant at the International Institute, which studies the Zone. To help the career of his boss, whom he considers a friend, he goes into the Zone with him on an official expedition to recover a unique artifact, which leads to his friend's death later on. This comes as a great shock when the news reaches Redrick, drunk in a bar, and he blames himself for his friend's fate. While Redrick is at the bar, a police force enters looking for stalkers. Redrick is forced to use a "shrieker" to make a hasty getaway. Red's girlfriend Guta is pregnant and decides to keep the baby no matter what. It is widely rumored that incursions into the Zone by stalkers carry high risk of mutations in their children, even though no radiation or other mutagens had been detected in the area. They decide to marry.

Section 2

Disillusioned Redrick returns to stalking. In the course of his joint expedition into the Zone with a fellow stalker named Burbridge The Vulture, the latter steps into a substance known as "hell slime," which slowly dissolves his leg bones. Amputation must be urgently performed to avoid certain death. Redrick pulls Burbridge out of the Zone and drops him off at a surgeon, avoiding the patrols. Later on Redrick is confronted by Burbridge's daughter, who gets angry at him for saving her father. Guta has given birth to a happy and intelligent daughter, fully normal but for having short, light full body hair and black eyes. They lovingly call her "Monkey." Redrick meets with his clients in a posh hotel, selling them a fresh portion of the Zone artifacts, but what they are really after is "hell slime". It is hinted that they want it for military research. Redrick claims he does not have it yet and leaves. Shortly afterward Redrick is arrested, but escapes. He then contacts his clients, telling them where he hid the "slime" sample that he had smuggled out previously. Redrick insists that all the proceeds from the sale be sent to Guta. He realizes that the "slime" will be used for some kind of weapon of mass destruction, but decides he has to provide for his family. He then gives himself up to the police.

Section 3

Redrick's old friend Richard Noonan, is revealed as a covert operative of an unnamed, presumably governmental, secret organization working to stop the contraband outflow of artifacts from the Zone. Believing that he's nearing the successful completion of his multi-year assignment, he is confronted and scolded by his boss, who reveals to him that the flow is stronger than ever, and is tasked with finding who is responsible and how they operate. It is revealed that the stalkers are now organized under the cover of the "weekend picnics-for-tourists" business set up by Burbridge. They jokingly refer to the setup as "Sunday school". Noonan meets with Dr. Valentine Pilman for lunch and they have an in-depth discussion of the Visitation and humanity in general. This is where the idea of "Visitation as a roadside picnic" is articulated. Redrick is home again, having served his time. Burbridge visits him regularly, trying to entice him into some secret project, but Redrick declines. Guta is depressed because their daughter has nearly lost her humanity and ability to speak, resembling a monkey more and more. Redrick's dead father is also present, having had come home from the cemetery inside the Zone, as other very slowly-moving reanimated dead are now returning to their homes all around town. They are usually destroyed by the authorities as soon as they are discovered; Redrick, however, had forcibly managed to defend his father from being taken away. Together Redrick's father and daughter symbolize the complete inhumanity of the Zone.

Section 4

Redrick goes into the Zone one last time in order to reach the wish-granting "Golden Sphere." He has a map, given to him by Burbridge, whose son Arthur joins him on the expedition. Redrick knows one of them has to die in order to temporarily deactivate a phenomenon known as the "meatgrinder" in order for the other to reach the sphere, but he keeps this a secret from Arthur, whom he intends to sacrifice to it in order to make a wish to turn his daughter back to normal. After they get to the location, surviving many obstacles, Arthur rushes towards the sphere shouting out selfless wishes for a better world, only to be savagely dispatched by the meatgrinder. With the "Golden Sphere" in front of him, an exhausted Redrick looks back in confusion and bitterness on his whole life of desperate survival in a harsh world, and finds that he cannot articulate what he actually wants from the sphere. In the end, after much unaccustomed introspection, Red comes to realise that despite his earlier contempt for the boy's apparent naivety, he wants nothing other than the same thing Arthur did: "HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND MAY NO ONE BE LEFT BEHIND!"

History

The story was written by the Strugatsky brothers in 1971. It was first published in the literary magazine Avrora in 1972, issues 7–10. Parts of it were published in Volume 25 of the Library of Modern Science Fiction in 1973. Roadside Picnic was refused publication in book form in the Soviet Union for eight years due to government censorship and numerous delays. The heavily censored versions published between 1980 and 1990 significantly departed from the original version. A Russian-language version endorsed by the Strugatsky brothers as the original was published in the 1970s.
By 1998, 38 editions of the novel had been published in 20 countries. The novel was first translated into English by Antonina W. Bouis. The preface to the first American edition of the novel was written by Theodore Sturgeon.

Awards and nominations