Roadside Picnic

“No, friends, it’s hard to describe this thing if you haven’t seen one. It looks much too simple, especially when you finally convince yourself that your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you. It’s like describing a glass to someone or, God forbid, a wineglass: you just wiggle your fingers in the air and curse in utter frustration.” 

Here, the authors capture just how foreign and strange these extraterrestrial artifacts are, despite their simplicity. The description suggests a culture that, owing to the aliens’ physiology or environment, is totally removed from anything humans would recognize.

“Although, to be fair, the Zone doesn’t give a damn who the good guys and the bad guys are, and it turns out we gotta thank you, Slug: you were an idiot, and no one even remembers your real name, but you did show us smarter folks were not to go.” 

Just as the aliens don’t care about humanity, the Zone they left in their wake doesn’t care either. Moreover, if the Zone is a metaphor for the capitalist West, this line underscores the inhumanity of such systems, wherein the most goodhearted or moral people become victims sacrificed in the service of the most fortunate.

“You can go right through a fire in this thing, and no gas will penetrate it. It’s even bulletproof, they say. Of course, fire, toxic gas, and bullets—these are only Earth perils. The Zone doesn’t have those; in the Zone you have other worries. Anyhow, truth be told, even in their specsuits people drop like flies.” 

Even before the authors depict anyone entering the Zone, they successfully evoke the extreme and mysterious dangers it poses. In his narration, Red draws a clear line between mere “Earth perils” and what can kill you in the Zone, creating an enormous amount of suspense for what’s to come.

“I don’t like it when other people sort things out for me. I’ve been sorting things out myself my whole life and plan to continue that way.” 

Redrick’s emphasis on self-reliance—a very Western, American ideal—is in many ways his downfall, putting him on a path that leads him in and out of prison and always back to the perilous Zone. Redrick finally rejects self-reliance and lays himself at the mercy of the Golden Sphere at the end of the novel. He does this for an arguably unrealistic utopian vision that may hold bitter relevance for the book’s Soviet authors.

“It stank of vulgarity, of the foul scum that had grown on the Zone, gotten rich by the Zone, fed, drank, and fattened from the Zone, and didn’t give a damn—and especially didn’t give a damn about what would happen when it gorged itself to its heart’s content, and all that used to be in the Zone settled in the outside world.” 

Redrick cannot abide those who profit off the Zone without braving its dangers like he does. These wealthy profiteers can’t possibly understand the utter terror the Visit brought with it, and Redrick is therefore understandably bitter that they reap its benefits. This quote also underscores the difficulty of Redrick’s desire to live outside a system he doesn’t consider an assault on his sense of human dignity and self-reliance. Again, he faces an impossible choice: struggle to survive on meager wages from the Institute, or work for these wealthy black market clients.

“He didn’t know the driver, a new guy, some pimply beaked kid, one of thousands who had recently flocked to Harmont looking for hair-raising adventures, untold riches, international fame, or some special religion; they came in droves but ended up as taxi drives, waiters, construction works, and bouncers in brothels—yearning, untalented, tormented by nebulous desires, angry at the whole world, horribly disappointed, and convinced that here, too, they’d been cheated.” 

The Strugatsky’s original term for “stalkers” was “prospectors.” While the authors were never satisfied with that term, the people attracted to the Zone—and the personal and professional failures most of them suffer—are akin to the individuals attracted to California during the Gold Rush of the 19th Century.

“The risen have no place to return, and that is why they’re sorrowful and stern.”

This short couplet helps defuse Richard’s obvious discomfort at the living corpses rising from the cemetery in the Zone. Unlike his colleague Valentine, he is unable to view the zombies as just another scientific anomaly, like the bug traps or even the hell slime. To Richard, the living corpses represent something far more sinister and macabre, in part because while they are products of the Zone, they possess human faces.

“Especially when it was discovered that spacells multiply. It turned out that the sore wasn’t such a sore; maybe it wasn’t a sore at all but, instead, a treasure trove… And now no one has a clue what it is—a sore, a treasure trove, an evil temptation, Pandora’s box, a monster, a demon… We’re using it bit by bit.” 

This quote addresses the speed with which industrialists and consumers completely change their perspective on the Zone as soon as they realize it can make them money. The need to understand becomes an afterthought for those who seek only to exploit the Zone despite the imminent consequences of doing so.

“Now, in Russia they’ve never even heard of stalkers. Over there, they really have an empty belt around the Zone—a hundred miles wide, no one around, none of these stinking tourists, and no Burbridges. Think simple, gentlemen! I swear this doesn’t need to be so complicated. No business in the Zone—good-bye, off you go to the hundred and first mile.”

In one of the only explicit references to Russia, the Strugatskys address the fact that in an oppressive nation governed by fear, nobody is brave enough to stand up to the state and smuggle items out of the Zone as a stalker. For a bureaucrat like Richard, this is naturally a favorable state of affairs.

“A new breed of stalker has appeared—armed with technology. The old stalker was a sullen, dirty man, stubborn as a mule, crawling through the Zone inch by inch on his stomach, earning his keep. The new stalker is a tie-wearing dandy, an engineer, somewhere a mile away from the Zone, a cigarette in his teeth, a cocktail by his elbow—sitting and watching the monitors. A salaried gentleman.” 

Despite his bureaucratic nature, Richard can’t help but feel a grudging respect for the old-school stalkers like Redrick. Though they have their differences, he and Redrick would both agree that to reap the benefits of the Zone, you should be willing to crawl through it yourself.

“Xenology is an unnatural mixture of science fiction and formal logic. At its core is a flawed assumption—that an alien race would be psychologically human.” 

This quote from Valentine is a subtle jab by the authors at their science-fiction contemporaries, who tend to anthropomorphize alien races for the purpose of storytelling. Valentine—and, by extension, the authors—are keen to realize that a species that evolved light-years away would likely have almost nothing in common with any creature found on Earth, let alone humans.

“Intelligence is the ability to harness the powers of the surrounding world without destroying the said world.” 

In his improvised dissertation on the nature of intelligence, Valentine offers a number of definitions of the world. Of them all, this is perhaps the most comforting. It suggests an aspirational kind of intelligence in which humanity conquers the world without destroying it. However, Richard is quick to dismiss such lofty framing—because while it may define “intelligence,” it certainly doesn’t define “human intelligence.”

“The God hypothesis, for example, allows you to have an unparalleled understanding of absolutely everything while knowing absolutely nothing.” 

Valentine explores the difference between understanding and knowledge. Although scientists like Valentine know that they will never understand the Zone, they continue to collect data—or knowledge—in an attempt do so. This reflects the human nature to quantify and objectify knowledge. 

“A picnic. Imagine: a forest, a country road, a meadow. A car pulls off the road into the meadow and unloads young men, bottles, picnic baskets, girls, transistor radios, cameras… […] And in the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that were watching the whole night in horror crawl out of their shelters. And what do they see? […] the remains of the campfire […].” 

By invoking the perspective of natural creatures such as animals and insects, the authors effectively cast humans as the “outsiders.” Likewise, this perspective can be applied to the aliens, who from a distance may view human behavior in horror, as a grotesque and meaningless spectacle. Here, human artifacts parallel the Visit Zone artifacts—objects that have no purpose except what we attribute to them. This is a commentary on the insignificance of existence. 

“You ask: what makes man great? It is that he re-created nature? That he harnessed forces of almost-cosmic proportions? That in a brief time he has conquered the planet and opened a window onto the universe? No! It is that despite all this, he has survived, and intends to continue doing so.” 

From this point of view, it doesn’t matter if humanity ever comes close to understanding the Zone and its contents. Despite the urge to understand and exploit, such efforts will not raise humanity’s status or bring it closer to that of the aliens who visited with such brevity and nonchalance. In fact, this compulsion to be smartest creature in the universe is self-defeating, especially if it leads to humanity’s own demise.

“But you have to admit, Richard, that the aliens had nothing to do with this. How could they have known about the existence of military-industrial complexes?” 

Though the exact details of North America’s present military engagement at this point in the book are unclear, Richard clearly blames it on the advanced technology left behind by the aliens. Valentine quickly disabuses Richard of this notion, implying that the relationship between technology and war is a human phenomenon that needs no help from aliens for its abuse.

“A lab monkey presses a red button and gets a banana, presses a white button and gets an orange, but has no idea how to obtain bananas or oranges without buttons. Nor does it understand the relationship between buttons and oranges and bananas.” 

Like in the picnic-framing device, the lab monkey metaphor effectively evokes humanity’s approach to the artifacts found in the Zone. By extension, the metaphor also applies to, say, an average smartphone user with no understanding of how microchips work, or a person who gets on an airplane without understanding of jet propulsion. Though extreme examples, a failure to possess a basic understanding of the tools one uses can certainly have unintended consequences.

“Do you really not see that from the perspective of fundamental principles, these corpses of yours are neither more nor less astonishing than the perpetual batteries? It’s just that the spacells violate the first principle of thermodynamics, and the corpses, the second; that’s the only difference. In some sense, we’re all cavemen—we can’t imagine anything more frightening than a ghost or a vampire.”

As a scientist, Valentine employs logic and reason to rationalize the existence of zombies. Although he attempts to comfort Richard with this perspective, Richard fails to accept the walking undead as akin to perpetual motion machines. In utilizing existing scientific concepts such as thermodynamics, the authors achieve two effects: they create a world not unlike our own, subsequently casting this dystopian future as a figurative possibility.

“It was only now that he’d understood—the one thing that he still had left, the one thing that had kept him afloat in recent months, was the hope for a miracle. […] And ever since his childhood, this self-reliance had always been measured by the amount of money he managed to wrench, wrestle, and wring out of the surrounding indifferent chaos. […] And now this hope—no longer the hope but the certainty of a miracle—was filling him to the brim, and he was already amazed that he’d managed to live in such a bleak, cheerless gloom.” 

Redrick’s character develops from one that celebrates the ingenuity required to thrive in his cutthroat world to one that realizes the true ghastly nature of such a system. As a commentary on Western capitalism, Roadside Picnic proposes that real success, i.e., the American Dream, is something that’s virtually impossible to achieve without both sacrificing one’s moral integrity and relying on a higher power.

“I didn’t drag out a man, I dragged out my mine detector. My trawler. A key. But back there, in the hot seat, I wasn’t even thinking about that. I dragged him like he was family, I didn’t even consider abandoning him, even though I’d forgotten about everything—about the key and about the Monkey. So what do we conclude? We conclude that I’m actually a good man. That’s what Guta keeps telling me, and what the late Kirill insisted on, and Richard always drones on about it […] Yeah, sure, a good man! Stop that, he told himself. Virtue is no good in this place!” 

The question of whether Red is a “good man” comes up frequently in the novel. The answer depends largely on whether the reader considers a man who will do anything for his family—even kill an innocent like Arthur—as “good.” However, due to the ruthless nature of this world, one will not survive on principles alone. 

“Now I get to decide. I, Redrick Schuhart, of sober judgment and sound mind, will be making decisions about everything for everyone. […] I’m done being led by the nose, my whole life I’ve been dragged by the nose, I kept bragging like an idiot that I do as I like, and you bastards would just nod, then you’d wink at each other and lead me by the nose, dragging me, hauling me, through shit, through jails, through bars […] Enough!”

Here, the debates over market-based capitalism and utopian communism fall away, and the novel reveals itself as a fable about man’s quest for human dignity. This desire for self-reliance appears in the way that Redrick spouts venom at everything and everyone except himself, from the profiteers to the cops to the Zone itself.

“It lay where it had fallen. It might have tumbled out of some huge pocket or gotten lost, rolling away, during a game between some giants—it hadn’t been placed here, it was lying around, just like all the empties, bracelets, batteries, and other junk left over from the Visit.” 

This quote neatly disabuses any kind of holy significance surrounding the Golden Sphere. While its power to grant wishes indeed feels like something of divine provenance, the Sphere is no different than any of the other “junk” the aliens left.

“Let us all be healthy, and let them all go to hell. Who’s us? Who’s them? I don’t understand a thing. If I’m happy, Burbridge is unhappy; if Burbridge is happy, Four-Eyes is unhappy; if Raspy is happy, everyone else is unhappy, and Raspy himself is unhappy, except her, the idiot, imagines that he’ll be able to wriggle out of it somehow. My Lord, it’s a mess, a mess!” 

This quote addresses the fundamental questions surrounding individualism and freedom that naturally arise when considering the comparative worth of various political and economic systems like democracy and capitalism. While Karl Marx sought a distant, utopian vision in which everyone is happy and fulfilled, Redrick cannot imagine such a state of affairs in the current system.