Roadside Picnic

Strugatsky, Arkady, Boris N. Strugatsky, and Olena Bormashenko. Roadside Picnic. Chicago, Illinois: Chicago Review Press, 2012. Print.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic is a first contact story with a crucial difference: the aliens never reveal themselves, nor do they give any hint of their purpose for visiting Earth. The only traces that remain of the encounter are several “Zones” of mysterious and dangerous debris left at seemingly random locations around the planet. The novel’s titular “picnic” is a metaphor for this; humans are insects that encounter an inscrutable array of artifacts leftover from an alien picnic; we are ants without the cognitive ability to understand the objects, their purpose, or their creator’s motivations. After finishing their “meal,” if you can call it a meal, the aliens simply disappear, leaving humans to sort through the aftermath. In this way, Roadside Picnic strongly parallels Lem’s Solaris, as both novels challenge the idea of human “cognitive universalism,” or the commonly-held notion that human ways of thinking about and being in the world could be mapped onto non-human entities.

The Zones containing the alien debris were evacuated, as many of the artifacts are dangerous to human life. Humans make periodic forays into the Zones to recover alien artifacts, but have had little success in reverse engineering alien technology or uncovering any clues as to the nature of the alien visit. So called “Stalkers,” criminals who enter the Zone illegally to treasure hunt, pass on birth defects to their children apparently caused by something in the Zone. Stalkers, when they move to other parts of the world after living and working near and in the Zone, also cause statistically-improbable disasters in the communities to which they relocate. The Zones themselves contain strange gravitational anomalies, corrosive sludge, and reanimate corpses that leave the Zone and continue, in a zombie-like way, their daily lives. Although humans have managed to appropriate some of the alien technology for their own use, such as small batteries with infinite life-spans, most of the phenomenon and objects remain inscrutable to science – much like the sentient ocean in Solaris.

The novel follows Red Schuhart, a stalker living near one of the Zones in what appears to be North America. While Schuhart works for a scientific institute that conducts official research in the Zone, he also conducts illegal treasure-hunting on the side, as many of the artifacts are highly-profitable on the black Market. The Zone is so dangerous that many die or suffer permanent damage navigating it, and skilled stalkers are highly-paid for their work. Schuhart also observes first-hand the corruption and greed surrounding the Zones; contact has not resulted in Enlightenment, but only confusion and moral decline.

In the novel’s conclusion, Schuhart finds a golden orb that is said to have the ability to grant a person’s innermost desire. This object raises a number of interesting philosophical and social questions. Does Schuhart, or anyone else, actually possess the language to articulate a desire that would be beneficial to humanity? In other words, what would his utopia look like? Schuhart detests the corruption that surrounds him, even while he participates in it. He seems to feel that the orb should be used for a higher purpose than simply manifesting one’s own idiosyncratic desires. However, while his purpose is noble, Schuhart sacrifices an apprentice stalker to gain access to the orb. He even borrows his words to the orb from the dead apprentice: “HAPPINESS, FREE, FOR EVERYONE, AND LET NO ONE BE FORGOTTEN!” (193). The words reveal that he does not have a concrete vocabulary for describing an ideal society, but instead asks the orb to “Look into my soul, I know – everything you need is in there. It has to be. Because I’ve never sold my soul to anyone! It’s mine, it’s human! Figure out yourself what I want – because I know it can’t be bad” (193).

Can we believe Schuhart? Doesn’t his ruthlessness in sacrificing the apprentice, and his history of crime, undermine his claim that his soul isn’t bad? Or is he redeemed by his utopian desire for universal happiness and peace, even if he is only able to voice this desire in a naïve way, in a plagiarized way? If we were granted the same opportunity, would our situation be any different? It’s here that the novel might be read as a political critique of the Soviet Union and its own ambiguous utopian aims. As Ursula K. Le Guin observes in her Foreword to the novel’s most recent edition, however, the story succeeds because it is as much about an individual as it is a political allegory.

Roadside Picnic was adapted by the authors into the film Stalker (1979) and the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of video games.