You wake up and it’s a lovely Sunday. The sun is shining and you decide to pack up the family, some food, balls, games, extra clothes etc. and head out into the wilderness to have a picnic. After a day of fun you once again pack up what you can find and head back to town. We’ve all had these kinds of days and they leave wonderful memories. Using this common occurrence, the Strugatsky brothers in their novel “Roadside Picnic”, then ask a peculiar question. How did this event affect the local insects that inhabit the picnic area as they slowly come out to investigate? Answering this question would form the basis of the novel. The only difference between the scenario above and that presented in their novel is that we humans are the insects.
It appears that the greatest event in human history has occurred. Aliens have visited the planet! Unfortunately no one saw them come, no one saw them during their brief stay and no one saw them leave. They made no contact and didn’t respond to any attempts at communication. Years after the event, a humbled humanity is forced to admit that instead of being a ‘alien contact’ event that this was just a stop over for the aliens on their way to somewhere more important. They didn’t contact us for the same reason humans don’t contact ants. It’s also embarrassing to admit but we’re pretty sure that they dumped their trash here before leaving and like all trash, someone needs to clean it up. However let’s not be too judgmental. Doesn’t the old saying go ‘One man’s trash is another man’s treasure’? Think of the possible technological breakthroughs even broken bits of alien technology can give us! Too bad wandering around in “The Zone” results in a very high rate of death.
Despite this there are a number of men who will risk it for the treasures that lie inside. While there is an official scientific community that buys objects, its much more lucrative, but highly illegal, to sell them to collectors on the black market. Red Schuhart is one of these men, collectively known as stalkers. He makes the fateful decision to take one of his scientist friends into the Zone to search for artifacts and too late notices him walking through what appears to be a spider web. Only in the Zone nothing can be taken for granted and the man dies of a heart attack the next day. Swearing to quit and get a normal job he runs into his girlfriend who tells him she is pregnant and going to keep the child. The offspring of Stalkers are always mutated and his girlfriend gives birth to a baby girl covered in soft golden fur. Red realizes he will never get out and in an attempt to provide for his family before he is arrested for smuggling he overcomes his misgivings and sells a Zone artifact to individuals he’s sure plan to use it as a weapon of mass destruction.
The strange ways life is different because of the Zone is just one of the interesting aspects of this book. There is no radiation but children are still born mutated. Red’s father digs himself out of the grave and comes back to live in his son’s house, picking up some of his old pastimes. People who are born near the Zone are not allowed to move to other cities or countries, as very high levels of natural disasters seem to follow them and the effect seems to be inheritable. The Zone has random areas of increased gravitation. Vehicles no longer run on gas but on a small self-replicating alien chips which no one understands. Other things present in the Zone are almost legendary due to their incomprehensibility.
The basic underlying premise is the assumption that we have no clue what the aliens left or how to use it. In an experiment a monkey pushes a button and gets a banana but does the monkey really understand what a button is? Or the chemical process used to make the button or the electric wiring that releases the banana? If we were ever visited by a truly alien civilization how would they be able to determine that we are intelligent? Why would they even want to talk to us? The artifacts found by stalkers in the Zone have changed life on Earth but for all we know we could be using sledgehammers to crack nuts, and what’s to say the next object pulled out may not leave our planet a sterile wasteland?
For years this book could only be found deep in the science fiction stacks of used bookstores but recently the Chicago Review Press has started reissuing the Strugatsky’s most popular volumes. The two brothers are the old Soviet Union’s most well-known science fiction writers and collaborated on a number of books. I highly recommend “Roadside Picnic” as an interesting change of pace for jaded science fiction enthusiasts but I would also recommend what is probably their best book “ The Doomed City “ as well.
© 2017 George Anadiotis
