Thanks, Todd, for minding the baby.
ROADSIDE PICNIC by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
(Review by Deb, from archives)
Recently,
a tape from the 1980s surfaced of the late Steve Jobs discussing—in
amazingly prescient detail—the future of computers. At
a time when few people even had a home computer, Jobs was already
talking about cloud computing, hand-held delivery devices, and the i-pod
prototype. As Jon Stewart of
the Daily Show observed after Jobs's death, it’s like we had a visit
from an extraterrestrial who left before he could explain how everything
is supposed to work.
This
is exactly the position of humans in ROADSIDE PICNIC (first published
in the Soviet Union in 1971, and anthologized in the west in 1977): It
has been a number of years since extraterrestrials visited the Earth, an
event referred to as the “visitation.” They
landed simultaneously in six places, stayed for a couple of days (as
one scientist puts it, almost as if they had a roadside picnic), and
then left—never to return, but leaving behind an assortment of debris
and areas of uninhabitable land called “forbidden zones.” (As
a side note, it’s indicative of how effective anti-littering campaigns
have been in the last 40 years that we probably now find it hard to
imagine leaving a picnic site without picking up our
trash—so the “roadside picnic” analogy, with debris strewn far and
wide, isn’t immediately recognizable to us.)
Scientists
(and black-market scavengers called “stalkers”) periodically visit
these forbidden zones to retrieve the material left behind. No
one is really sure how the aliens used these items, but many are bent
to human purposes, such as sparkling bracelets that ease pain and
disc-like batteries that replace fossil fuel in cars. However,
there is also great danger in the zones—mine explosions, sudden violent
winds, searing heat, gravity-defying earth shifts, and a deadly
quicksand-like “slime”—so that most countries have completely shut down
access to them. The only zone that is relatively accessible is in the city of Harmont, which is where ROADSIDE PICNIC takes
place.
The
book is essentially a series of inter-connected vignettes, most of them
featuring a stalker named Red Schuhart, that take place over a number
of years following the visitation. Red’s
steely nerves and extrasensory awareness of danger have made it
possible for him to make successful excursions into the zone. He is
considered one of the best stalkers and is even occasionally employed in
a semi-official capacity by the government to retrieve items for
scientific study—although there is far more money to be made selling the
items illegally on the black market. But Red’s luck starts to run out when a scientist dies after he returns with Red from an official visit to the zone. Later,
during an illegal foray into the zone, Red’s partner, a stalker named
Burbridge, sinks into the slime. Red could have left Burbridge to die,
but instead helps him get out. (It
is honorable acts such as his rescue of Burbridge that set Red apart
from other stalkers and make us like and admire him despite his
dangerous and criminal activities in the forbidden zone.) As
a result, Burbridge survives but loses his legs, and Red ends up in
prison—requesting that his share of contraband profit go to support his
pregnant girlfriend, Guta.
When
Red is released from prison several years later, the city of Harmont is
in visible decline. Despite constant vigilance, the government can’t
stop a criminal syndicate (under the direction of the legless Burbridge)
from making frequent excursions into the zone, flooding the market with
artifacts, many of which cause harm or are used in a dangerous way by
the shadowy underworld figures who buy them. In addition, the dead of Harmont are rising from their graves and wandering back to their homes. This
phenomenon is not presented in a spooky, zombie apocalypse way, but in a
matter-of-fact tone that makes it easy to accept that Red’s dead father
is now living in the apartment with Red, Guta, and their daughter. The
daughter, never called any name but “Monkey” because her body is
entirely covered with hair, is suffering from such severe genetic
mutations that doctors determine she is not actually human. These
mutations are undoubtedly the result of Red’s visits to the zone, but he
repeatedly returns there, unable to resist the lure of both the money
and the adrenaline rush that the visits provide.
Eventually,
Burbridge persuades Red to venture once more into the zone, along with
Burbridge’s rather naive and idealistic son, to retrieve the Golden
Sphere, an almost mythic item that supposedly grants wishes. Red knows
that either he or Burbridge’s son must die in order for the survivor to
reach the Sphere—although whether Burbridge or his son realizes this is
left somewhat ambiguous. The
last few pages of the book are unbearably tense as the men approach the
Sphere while attempting to dodge horrific phenomena, such as
skin-blistering heat and a booby-trap known, for reasons that soon
become sickeningly obvious, as “the meat grinder.” The ending can be seen as hopeful, cynical, nihilistic, or all three, depending on your
perspective and how you interpret the final paragraph.
If
you plan to read ROADSIDE PICNIC, I strongly recommend the 2012
edition, which includes an informative introduction by Ursula K. Le Guin
and a long afterword by Boris Strugatsky in which he details the fight
the brothers had with the Soviet censorship apparatus. It
took years of tweaking and constant demands for minor word and text
alterations before authorities finally approved the book for publication
in 1971; it would be another 20 years before the book appeared as the
brothers originally wrote it. Boris Strugatsky’s recent death (Arcady died in 1991) makes his afterword even more poignant. Strugatsky writes that for decades he kept the hundreds of letters and memos that went back and
forth between the brothers and the censors. He
had intended to eventually publish a book documenting the nonsensical,
Kafkaesque changes that the bureaucrats required to deem ROADSIDE PICNIC
acceptable. But by the
mid-1990s, Strugatsky realized that it was unlikely that anyone would
still be interested in the petty squabbles and in-fighting of the
now-defunct Soviet bureaucracy and gave up the idea of developing the
book. So ROADSIDE PICNIC stands
alone—a testament to the writers’ stubborn refusal to surrender in the
face of almost overwhelming government opposition to a simple idea,
encapsulated in a rather ironic way by the book’s final wish: Happiness for everybody, free, and no one will go away unsatisfied!
Sergio Angelini,
SHE DIED A LADY, Carter Dickson
Yvette Banek,
THE POWER HOUSE, John Buchan
Joe Barone,
IRON LAKE, William Kent Kruger
Les Blatt,
Arsine Lupin, Gentleman -Thief, Maurice LeBlanc
Brian Busby,
Hooked, Ernie Hollands with Doug Brendel
Bill Crider,
PASSION CACHE, Harry Whittington
Scott Cupp,
MUSRUM. Eric Thatcher and Anthony Earnshaw
Martin Edwards,
MYSTERY OF THE THREE ORCHIDS, Augusto De Angelis
Richard Horton,
CASUALS OF THE SEA, William McFree
Jerry House,
WEIRD TALES ONLINE
George Kelley,
BEST MYSTERY STORIES OF THE YEAR, 1945, ed. David Cooke
Margot Kinberg,
CAN ANYBODY HELP ME?, Sinead Crowley
Rob Kitchin,
THE DIVIDED CITY, Luke McCallin
B.V. Lawson,
MOVIE POSTER ART OF THE FILM NOIR
Evan Lewis,
THE DEEP END Fredric Brown
Steve Lewis/Bill Pronzini,
THE SHATTERED RAVEN, Edward D. Hoch
Todd Mason,
THE INVESTIGATIONS OF AVRAM DAVIDSON: Collected
Mysteries, edited by Grania Davis and Richard A. Lupoff
J.F. Norris, WHAT HAPPENED TO HAMMOND?, John Russell Fearn
Matt Paust,
WHISTLE, James Jones
James Reasoner,
THE BEST OF SPICY MYSTERY, Vol 2 ed. Alfred Jan
Kevin Tipple,
MEN IN THE MAKING, Bruce Machart
TomCat,
HAPPY ARE THOSE WHO MOURN, Andrew Greeley
TracyK,
OVER MY DEAD BODY, Rex Stout
