Roadside Picnic has a very particular heritage. There is a book. It was then made into a movie, which took the last 30 pages and went its own way. It’s great. Then they made it into a game, which takes some ideas for the basic premise, and then the authors went their own way, creating an antithesis of the book. I’ve been told it’s good. But this time: the novel.
In the near future, aliens have landed on Earth. No one knows why, but they came and went without much ado. Their landing site is now called the zone. Before leaving, the aliens left some artifacts. We don’t know what they are, but there is the promise of giant leaps for mankind. Therefore, a new occupation is born: - stalkers, who venture into the zone and try ans retrieve some alien leftovers. The zone is dangerous, and stalkers often lose their lives upon making the smallest mistakes.
But Roadside Picnic is not a book about that. It’s depressing and full of commentary on humanity. Very often, people call it the best book by the Strugatsky brothers, and who am I to disagree?
But it is not a book about aliens, or the zone. Those things exist, but first contact went and gone. Stalkers are not the heroes of humanity, they are expendable criminals. We think we may someday understand what happened, but we may as well not. The aliens visited Earth, but most likely haven’t found anything of interest. What people are dying for, what may change the entire planet, may be nothing but some trash left on the side of the road.
The cosmos is not something to explore or conquer. It’s vast, and our planet is insignificant.
And this is what the book is about. The Zone occupies very small portion of the novel, it’s just means to an end. Red, the main hero, is just trying to make a living. He is not shy about drinking, visiting a bordello or cheating on his wife. At the same time, he is not shown as an evil person, because his existence doesn’t matter. Even though he is one of the most experienced stalkers, his death would mean nothing.
The novel is also much less adventurous than one could expect, knowing the movie or the games. We spend just a handful of pages in the Zone, the rest happens in the nearby town. Roadside Picnic is beautiful as anti-SiFi story. Everything we were taught to believe by western SciFi, the authors ignore. There is nothing there for us. We are nothing. Space exploration? Meeting aliens? We don’t even have any hopes or dreams left.
But this makes the novel timeless. Our entertainment is no longer optimistic. We are not going into Star Trek, we missed that ship. Maybe hope in our insignificance is better than thinking we are our own worst enemy?
Roadside Picnic gets my high recommendation. Similarly to Hard to be God, the reader may breeze through it. It’s short, and it’s easy to read. But then we reach the last pages, where the weight of the story is passed us.
There was to be an American TV series based on Roadside. All that we got was trailer which clearly shows, that it is impossible to make an Americanized version. In it, a shot of people saluting the stalker is shown, which is a complete antithesis of what the Stugatsky brothers are telling us.