- Title: Roadside Picnic
- Author: Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (translated by Olena Bormashenko)
- Published: 1972
- Publisher: Chicago Review Press (printed 2012)
- ISBN: 978-1-61374-341-6
The movie “Stalker,” directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, has long captivated cinema enthusiasts. The movie is well known as its complex and enigmatic imagery as well as its philosophical blending of universal intrinsic psychological tendencies – fantasies, fears, desires, impulses, and memories.
The movie is loosely based on the Russian SF novel “Roadside Picnic” by Arkady And Boris Strugatsky. The novel’s plot is easier to follow than the movie’s because the book presents the background, place, time, and conditions under the story unfolds directly to you.
The central focus of the novel is the “Zone,” a site visited by aliens. This contact is very different from what we usually see in SF novels or movies; there is no actual contact between humans and aliens. There are only remnants and residues, none of which humans understand. Similarly, in “Solaris,” Stanislaw Lem depicts our naive assumption of easy communication with other intelligent life forms – an idea Lem called it “the myth of our cognitive universalism.” Both Lem and Strugatsky brothers question our mechanism of understanding: how we know and what we know.
In “Roadside Picnic,” we, human beings, are in a state of total ignorance, left only with speculations. The signification – the creation of meaning – is one of the most important aspects of human psychology; we literally live inside a web of interconnected symbols. Without making and connecting these symbols, we cannot make sense of our world. Lacanian psychology suggests that a lack of symbolization – a hole in our symbolic reality – is the rrot of mental problems. Human beings try to give meaning or excuses to everything, a process we call “reasoning“.
[Spolier alert]
It is interesting to find out why the title of the novel is “Roadside Picnic.” In the novel, everyone tries to find out why aliens visited the Earth, why they stayed, what they did, why they left some remnants behind. No one finds the answer (only YET). One suggestion, not accepted, is that aliens just stayed on Earth briefly while travelling without special reason and left some garbage behind. It is like we, humans, stopping somewhere during our road trip, staying a little bit, throwing away some leftovers, leaving the place, and maybe even forgetting what happened after that. Do we care about the bugs on the ground while we were there? Just a minor annoyance. That is all.
The SF novels from US writers in the mid 20th century are, in general, pretty interesting. They have insights into human behaviors and the impact of technological progress. However, they are, in general, base on reason. Meanwhile, “Roadside Picnic” questions this basic assumption of “Reason.” Sometimes, we might need to see the world more directly. The answer might be simpler than we think.
Scriptorium 