Roadside Picnic

What is not generally known to the readers of science fiction in English is that the most widely read science-fiction writer in the world is not Heinlein or Bradbury or Clarke, but Stanislaw Lem, a Pole; that the largest science-fiction section of a writers' union is in Hungary; that excellent science fiction is being produced in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and especially in the Soviet Union. Some of this—far too little—is beginning to trickle into the English-speaking world, and, sad to say, a certain portion suffers from execrable translation. Some works have had the hazards of translation more than doubled by passing from the original to a second language before being rendered from that into English, a process in which the style and character of even a laundry list could hardly be expected to survive. Keeping that in mind, however, the discerning reader will find, even in the most brutalized of translations, a strength and inventiveness marvelous to behold.

In the highest echelon of Soviet science-fiction writers stand the names of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. I first encountered these talented brothers in a novel called Hard to Be a God. Remarkable, purely as a novel, for structure, characterization, pacing, and its perceptive statements of the human condition, it touches also on almost every single quality most avidly sought by the science-fiction reader. It has space flight and future devices; it has that wondrous “what if … ?” aspect in its investigation into sociology; by its richly detailed portraiture of an alien culture it affords a new perspective on the nature of ours and ourselves; it even has that exciting hand-to-hand conflict so dear to the hearts of that cousin of science fiction called swords-and-sorcery. And among its highest virtues is this: though there are battles and fights and blood and death where the narrative calls for them, the super-potent protagonist never kills anybody. Writers everywhere, keeping in mind in these violent times their responsibility for their influence, should take note. It can be done, and done well, at no expense to tension and suspense.

And now comes Roadside Picnic … In the so-called Golden Age of American science fiction, when the late John W. Campbell, editor extraordinary, gathered around him in a handful of months the greatest stable of science fiction talent ever seen, he would throw out challenges to his writers, like: “Write me a story about a man who will die in twenty-four hours unless he can answer this question: 'How do you know you're sane?' “; and this one—surely one of the most provocative of all: “Write me a story about a creature that thinks as well as a man but not like a man.” (The answer “Woman” is disallowed as too obvious a rejoinder.)

The Strugatskys posit that the Earth experiences a brief visit from extraterrestrials, who leave behind them—well, call it litter, such as might be left by you and me (in one of our less socially conscious moments) after a roadside picnic. The nature of these discards, products of an utterly alien technology, defies most earthly logic, to say nothing of earthly analytical science, and their potential is limitless. Warp these potentials into all-too-human goals—the quest for pure knowledge for its own sake, the search for new devices, new techniques, to achieve new heights in human well-being; the striving for profit, with its associated competitiveness; and the ravening thirst for new and more terrible weapons—and you have the framework of this amazing short novel. Add the Strugatskys' deft and supple handling of loyalty and greed, of friendship and love, of despair and frustration and loneliness, and you have a truly superb tale, ending most poignantly in what can only be called a blessing. You won't forget it.