On fiction- everyman revisited at a Roadside Picnic
I've recently re-read "Roadside Picnic", from the Strugatski brothers. And I must say, when Norman Spinrad praised the moral transformation present in Alfred Bester's "The stars my destination", I think he should have actually been talking about this book.
"Roadside Picnic" is famous for 'The Zone', or rather, the Zones, places where some kind of aliens have landed, then quickly departed, without attempting contact with humanity, but having left behind various bizzare artefacts.
You have an early example of nanotech in SF, 'the witches' jelly', a "colloidal gas" which turns organic matter into more witches' jelly. You have 'mosquito mange', a "graviconcentrate", a region of intense gravitational attraction that can squish unwary passers-by. You have 'empties', whose purpose is mysterious, 'so-so's, which turn out to be eternal, and replicating, batteries, and so on.
The inventiveness of the artefacts is not the deep feature of the book, though it is the one that is most immediately endearing. It's not even the book's overt attempts at depth and heaviosity that put it on the short list of greatest SF. Though it must be said, there is one conversation where two characters bounce some pretty large ideas around about the purpose of the Zone. Is it some gift, so that humanity can learn and join the other intelligent species of the galaxy? Or is it, simply, trash left by picnic goers, who never really noticed nor cared for the ants crawling in the grass? Is Mankind's destiny to know, or are curiosity and reason simply some incomplete instinct, a phase that we as a species will grow out of? It's obvious that the Strugatskys were aiming high with this book, but they relegate the overt exploration of philosophical themes to what is, essentially, a foot-note in the plot, and they never overtly choose an answer, they merely present several options to choose from (it is possible to read, and be fairly sure, what their opinions are, but they give all sides a share).
The real strength of the book lies in following its premise into its mundane- or not- conclusions. So, aliens popped over to Earth, left some scrap around, then left. What happens? And what the Strugatskys show just looks real, for all the miraculous and physics defying Zones. The Zones are walled in, artifacts are taken out, at great risk and often illegally. Sometimes for study, sometimes for civilian science, sometimes for military applications. Some artifacts enter technological use, others remain puzzles, challenges to our view of the world.
But in a fundamental sense, the world doesn't change. We now have forever running batteries, and yet there's always room for crime, deception, and injustice. People will live with the cards dealt to them, and most of the book concerns the smuggling of artifacts from the Zone, done by people known as 'stalkers', new criminals for a post-visitation Earth, but answering a need as old as life, the need to make ends meet somehow.
It's from among the stalkers that the main character is selected, the local Gully Foyle, only here known as Red Schuhart. Red is not quite the primitive brute that Foyle was, as the Strugatskys do not want their everyman to be a caricature. Red is simply self-reliant, brutal when he needs to be, concerned with money because you need money so as not to care about it, resourceful, and loving of his family.
Yes, Red's a stalker and he does on occasion throw a few punches, but he's almost never portrayed as anything that would be called evil. He's just everyone. He does, in a way, appreciate the idealistic visions of a visiting Russian scientist as beautiful dreams (a place where the authors insert their own utopic vision; and promptly kill their avatar off) but only that- just dreams, disconnected with how the world actually is and will be.
So in a sense, the Strugatskys appear to have made the moral journey for the character easier, by starting him higher than Foyle. That said, they do present Red commit an evil by omission, an evil perfectly in character with the Red we have known until then. But they also, unlike Bester I'd argue, actually present a moral journey. We understand, clear as day, why the cynical, self-reliant Red Schuhart needs to hope for a miracle. And slowly, surely, in an elegant construction in the final act, we understand why Schuhart, cynical, self-reliant protector of his home microcosm, chooses to act for the good of everyone.
And in the end, that is the legacy of the Zone. Not eternal batteries, colloidal gases or gravitational anomalies. It is the chance to make the wild eyed dreams of utopian future real not by technology, but because in their heart of hearts everyone wants the rat race to be over. The key to understanding the Strugatskys here is to remember where they wrote- the Soviet Union of the 60s- and the ideas that influenced them. I'll return in another post and mention how they skewered the way the USSR had betrayed the dream of a New Man who would be removed from material concerns. It is a dream in which the Strugatskys earnestly believed however. And the dream itself is beautiful.
"Roadside Picnic" is famous for 'The Zone', or rather, the Zones, places where some kind of aliens have landed, then quickly departed, without attempting contact with humanity, but having left behind various bizzare artefacts.
You have an early example of nanotech in SF, 'the witches' jelly', a "colloidal gas" which turns organic matter into more witches' jelly. You have 'mosquito mange', a "graviconcentrate", a region of intense gravitational attraction that can squish unwary passers-by. You have 'empties', whose purpose is mysterious, 'so-so's, which turn out to be eternal, and replicating, batteries, and so on.
The inventiveness of the artefacts is not the deep feature of the book, though it is the one that is most immediately endearing. It's not even the book's overt attempts at depth and heaviosity that put it on the short list of greatest SF. Though it must be said, there is one conversation where two characters bounce some pretty large ideas around about the purpose of the Zone. Is it some gift, so that humanity can learn and join the other intelligent species of the galaxy? Or is it, simply, trash left by picnic goers, who never really noticed nor cared for the ants crawling in the grass? Is Mankind's destiny to know, or are curiosity and reason simply some incomplete instinct, a phase that we as a species will grow out of? It's obvious that the Strugatskys were aiming high with this book, but they relegate the overt exploration of philosophical themes to what is, essentially, a foot-note in the plot, and they never overtly choose an answer, they merely present several options to choose from (it is possible to read, and be fairly sure, what their opinions are, but they give all sides a share).
The real strength of the book lies in following its premise into its mundane- or not- conclusions. So, aliens popped over to Earth, left some scrap around, then left. What happens? And what the Strugatskys show just looks real, for all the miraculous and physics defying Zones. The Zones are walled in, artifacts are taken out, at great risk and often illegally. Sometimes for study, sometimes for civilian science, sometimes for military applications. Some artifacts enter technological use, others remain puzzles, challenges to our view of the world.
But in a fundamental sense, the world doesn't change. We now have forever running batteries, and yet there's always room for crime, deception, and injustice. People will live with the cards dealt to them, and most of the book concerns the smuggling of artifacts from the Zone, done by people known as 'stalkers', new criminals for a post-visitation Earth, but answering a need as old as life, the need to make ends meet somehow.
It's from among the stalkers that the main character is selected, the local Gully Foyle, only here known as Red Schuhart. Red is not quite the primitive brute that Foyle was, as the Strugatskys do not want their everyman to be a caricature. Red is simply self-reliant, brutal when he needs to be, concerned with money because you need money so as not to care about it, resourceful, and loving of his family.
Yes, Red's a stalker and he does on occasion throw a few punches, but he's almost never portrayed as anything that would be called evil. He's just everyone. He does, in a way, appreciate the idealistic visions of a visiting Russian scientist as beautiful dreams (a place where the authors insert their own utopic vision; and promptly kill their avatar off) but only that- just dreams, disconnected with how the world actually is and will be.
So in a sense, the Strugatskys appear to have made the moral journey for the character easier, by starting him higher than Foyle. That said, they do present Red commit an evil by omission, an evil perfectly in character with the Red we have known until then. But they also, unlike Bester I'd argue, actually present a moral journey. We understand, clear as day, why the cynical, self-reliant Red Schuhart needs to hope for a miracle. And slowly, surely, in an elegant construction in the final act, we understand why Schuhart, cynical, self-reliant protector of his home microcosm, chooses to act for the good of everyone.
And in the end, that is the legacy of the Zone. Not eternal batteries, colloidal gases or gravitational anomalies. It is the chance to make the wild eyed dreams of utopian future real not by technology, but because in their heart of hearts everyone wants the rat race to be over. The key to understanding the Strugatskys here is to remember where they wrote- the Soviet Union of the 60s- and the ideas that influenced them. I'll return in another post and mention how they skewered the way the USSR had betrayed the dream of a New Man who would be removed from material concerns. It is a dream in which the Strugatskys earnestly believed however. And the dream itself is beautiful.
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