The strategy of preserving the mystery, if it is to be optimal, requires a precise concretizing. One cannot manage it in the way that theology does its subject, by working with contradictions. One cannot ascribe mutually exclusive purposes to the visitors — for example, they cannot want to conquer and at the same time not conquer. Still, one can rouse the appearance of such a contradiction — for example, the visitors may believe they are helping us, though we may feel that their actions are pernicious — and here one enters the realm of what is promising from a dramaturgical perspective: misunderstandings occasioned by the drastic disparity between civilizations. One can find attempts in this direction in science fiction, but they are not followed through: the intercivilizational misunderstandings always stay extraordinarily primitive puerilities which do not merit serious consideration. The author must invest a certain amount of intellectual effort in the construction of the quid pro quo that perplexes the meeting of two disparate cultures. The more factors from various areas that contribute to such a misunderstanding, the better. One ought to keep in mind that such an encounter is not a duel between two heroes, but a very confused interplay in which collective social organizations take part, organizations that differ radically from each other and to each of which the structure, meaning, and purpose of the other’s actions are foreign.
The overwhelming majority of science-fiction texts can serve as examples of how not to tackle the theme of invasion. It is therefore all the more gratifying to come upon a work which, by and large, knows how to deal with the problem successfully. In Roadside Picnic, the Strugatsky brothers have employed the tactic of preserving the mystery to excellent effect; indeed, as they surpass the canon established by Wells, so, too, they transcend the science-fiction tradition.
Roadside Picnic relies on two ideas. The first we have already designated as the strategy of preserving the mystery of the visitors. One does not know what they look like; one does not know what they want; one does not know why they came to this world, what their intentions were respecting humankind. Nor does one know exactly whether it’s absolutely certain that they have landed on earth at all, and if they have, whether they have already left again…
The second idea — and this is what makes Roadside Picnic an anomaly in science fiction — pertains to humanity’s reaction to the landing. For something has landed — or, to put it more circumspectly, something has fallen from the sky. The inhabitants of Harmont have found that out tragically enough. In some areas of the city people go blind; in others, they fall victim to mysterious illnesses that are generally described as plague; and the depopulated area of the city turns into the Zone, whose properties, menacing as they are incomprehensible, abruptly separate it from the outside world. Yet the actual landing was no great natural catastrophe: it did not cause houses to topple down, nor did it make windows break for miles around. The book does not tell us much about what happened in the first phase of the creation of the Zone. Still, we learn enough to understand that we will not be able to fit the events and their consequences into any compartment of already-existing classificatory schemes. Those who escaped from Harmont in one piece and moved elsewhere become the center of incomprehensible events, of extreme deviations from the statistical norm (ninety percent of the clients of a hairdresser who left Harmont die in the course of a year, though of “ordinary” causes — in a criminal attack, in traffic accidents — and wherever emigrants from the Zone increasingly congregate, the incidence of natural catastrophes rises proportionately, as Dr. Pilman informs Noonan).
We thus have before us an incomprehensible infringement on causal connections. The narrative effect is striking. It has nothing to do with phantasmagoria in the form of a “visitation,” because nothing supernatural occurs; and yet we are confronted with a mystery that is “much more terrifying than a stampede of ghosts” (as Dr. Pilman says, 3:109).[18] Should someone seek for a hypothesis that would explain these effects, it might be possible to find one. (Let us assume that what has happened is caused by local disturbances of certain physical constants responsible for the normal probability curves in typical statistical equations: that is the easiest explanation, though only, of course, as it indicates the direction in which more research would have to be done, and not in the sense of being a solution to the problem.) It turns out, then, that even when one has found a physical process whereby the mechanics of the unusual events can be explained rationally, one has not come a hair’s breadth closer to the heart of the problem — viz., to the nature of the visitors. Thus the optimal strategy consists of presenting the individual actions of the visitors as a puzzle whose resolution either does not throw any light at all on the nature of the visitors or makes that nature seem even more unfathomable. This is not, as it might perhaps appear to be, something made up, like a fantasy novel’s ad hoc inventions; since our knowledge of the world is acquired in just this way: perceiving some of its laws and peculiarities does not lessen the number of problems left to be solved; on the contrary, while making these discoveries, we begin to realize that there are further mysteries and dilemmas of whose existence we hitherto had no presentiment. Evidently, then, the scientific learning process can produce from its treasury even more “fantastic” wonders than the fairy-tale repertory does childish ones.
In Roadside Picnic things do not go as they do in The War of the Worlds. Wells’s story of the Martian invasion involves a nightmarish, monumental breakdown of the human world, a dramatically heightened collapse of civilized order under visibly inflicted blows. One knows who the opponent is; one knows his methods; even his final goals are known (it would be difficult not to guess them!). All this has nothing in common with Roadside Picnic. To be sure, the invasion has presumably occurred; to be sure, it has left behind ineradicable traces in the form of “Zones”; and earth is incapable of coming to grips with the consequences. Yet at the same time, the little world of humanity continues as before. Ominous miracles, descending on six spots on the planet like a cosmic rain, become the focal points of the various — legal as well as illegal — human activities that go on around all supposed sources of profit, no matter how risky they are. The Strugatskys realize the strategy of preserving the mystery through an extremely subversive tactic — through well-nigh microscopic bearings on what is going on. We learn only through hearsay that experiments are being made on the “magnetic traps” discovered in the Zones, and that somewhere or other institutes for the study of extraterrestrial cultures are busy trying to comprehend the nature of the landing. About what governments think of the Zones, about how the Zones’ instauration has affected world politics, we find out nothing. By contrast, we witness every last detail of some episodes in the life of a “stalker,” of a new breed of smuggler who, because a demand exists for them, spends nights retrieving objects from the Zone. Through verbal snapshots, the story shows how the Zone has become surrounded, as a foreign body does when it has penetrated a living human organism, only in this case by a tissue of opposed interest groups: those connected with the official guardianship of the Zone (i.e., the UN), but also the police, the smugglers, the scientists, and — let’s not forget them — the members of the entertainment industry. This encirclement of the Zone by a ring of feverish activity is depicted with considerable sociological insight. Certainly the portrayal is one-sided, but the authors had good reason to focus on those figures whose activity, in a marked but also quite natural way, counters the typical science-fiction scheme of things. The sense of fascination and depression that the “scenes from the life of a treasure hunter” (or “stalker”), the core of the story, inspire in the reader are the product of a deliberately restricted field of vision. The scientific and extrascientific literature that the landing precipitated must undoubtedly have been a focus of bitter controversy. So, too, the landing must inevitably have brought about the formation of new attitudes and lines of thought; and it probably has not left either art or religion untouched; yet our perspective on the whole upheaval is perforce confined to the excerp
ts from the life of a poor joe who, in the drama of two civilizations colliding, strictly plays the part of a human ant.
It would nevertheless be a good idea for us to make ourselves aware of wider aspects of the event. Everyone will agree with Dr. Pilman’s words that the invasion represents a decisive stroke in the history of mankind. Now in that history there have been quite a number of decisive moments, even though they were not exactly caused by a cosmic invasion; and each was marked by an intensification of the extremes of human behavior. Each of these decisive moments had its larger-than-life-size figures and its pitiable victims. The greater the historic event, the more pronounced was the distance between the great and the insignificant, the sublimity and the wretchedness of human fates. Glorious battles at sea that once decided the destiny of empires possessed at a distance the beauty of a painting of a battle, and close up a repulsive gruesomeness. One need only recall that chained to their benches, the rowers of galleys burned to death in Greek fire silently, because before the battle they were obliged to stuff their mouths with special pears to prevent their making any noise. (Their hellish shrieks, you see, would have had a negative effect on the soldiers’ morale!) Perceptions of such a battle would differ radically, depending on whether it were seen from the elevated perspective of the commanders, with their imperial aims, or from the viewpoint of the poor devils faced with a death struggle — and yet their death struggle was an integral part of the process of historical change. One could say that even such a beneficial discovery as that of X-rays, for example, had its horrific side, since the discoverers, unaware of the properties of these rays, had to have limbs amputated because of their effect. So, too, one of the by-products of the world’s industrialization is the leukemia that children are slowly dying from today. (We know this to be true, even though the causal connection cannot be palpably demonstrated.) The dreadful fate of the stalkers in Roadside Picnic, I should add, does not represent an extraordinary deviation brought about by the cosmic landing, but is precisely the rule of decisive moments in history — a rule that distinctly points up the constant and inevitable connection between “picturesque” greatness and horrifying misery.
The Strugatsky brothers thus demonstrate that they are realists of the fantastic inasmuch as realism in fantasy betokens a respect for logical consequence, an honesty in deducing all conclusions entirely from the assumed premises. Even the uninhibited entertainment industry that encircles the Zone has its plausibility — indeed, I would say its necessity. The principles of human behavior operating in the narrative are thus the same as they ever are; the authors have merely directed their attention to the “dregs” in the cosmic encounters, so to speak — and the events thereby take the concrete form of a miracle introduced into a consumer society. This is not — what is sometimes meant by the latter term — a society that produces nothing but those goods to which consumers are immediately attracted. On the contrary, it is a society that considers everything to be within the scope of its endeavor: not only cars, refrigerators, and perfume but also sex, blood, and destruction it makes items for consumption, in good time seasoning each of them so that they become palatable. In the Middle Ages, the Zones would doubtless have caused movements of panic-stricken flight and migration; and they might afterward have become centers of new religious beliefs, originating in response to their evidence for the Apocalypse, and breeding grounds for prophecies and revelations. In our world, however, the Zones succumb to being domesticated; for what one can neither understand nor ignore, one can at least consume piecemeal. Accordingly, the Zones, rather than being the subject of eschatological thought, are the goal of bus tours. This admits of being explained with reference to a lust for phenomena once regarded solely as abhorrent but these days enforcing the popularity of an aesthetic that in place of beauty has set the repulsive. That is the spirit of the times to which in the Strugatskys’ story anything evincing its complete independence from man — as the mysteriousness of the visitors nearly does — succumbs. All in all, Roadside Picnic implies that the landing passes over ninety-nine percent of humankind without a trace; and precisely in this regard, the Strugatskys set themselves against the entire science-fiction tradition.
Theirs is no banal opposition. Dr. Pilman, given to expressing himself in the terminology of physics, calls mankind a “stationary system” (3:100); translated into the language of the historian, this means that contact with the aliens, insofar as it does not equate with a global catastrophe, cannot change the course of human history with one fell swoop, since mankind is not capable of suddenly leaping out of its history and — impelled by a cosmic intervention — stepping into a completely different history. This supposition — in my view a correct one — is something that science fiction has neglected in its avidity for the sensational. In Roadside Picnic, by contrast, the landing is not intended as something strange for the sake of its strangeness; instead, it establishes the starting conditions for a thought-experiment in the domain of the “experimental philosophy of history” — and that is exactly what determines the value of this book.
There is only one point about which I would fain take issue with the book — a point having to do not with human matters (these are presented unobjectionably), but with the actual nature of the visitors. I might premise my discussion on four propositions. The first is that in the book we are given data, but not necessarily opinions about these data, even when the characters harboring such opinions are holders of the Nobel Prize. This means that we consider ourselves to have as much of a warrant to postulate theories about the visitors as the fictional personages have. Second, on all imaginable levels of knowledge there is given no hundred-percent error-free course of action. Such infallibility would of course require that one possessed complete information about what can occur in the course of making one’s plans a reality; but the universe is a place in which the attaining of complete information about anything whatever is never possible. According to the third of my propositions, the principle of freedom from contradictions in thinking obtains for us as for other beings in the cosmos. This means that of two things, one must prove to be the case: if the “visitors” were aware of the presence of humans on earth, then they cannot at the same time have been unaware of it; if they harbored any design at all vis-à-vis human beings, then they could not at the same time have harbored no design; and so on. Finally, in explaining unknown phenomena, the simplest hypotheses, as stipulated by the principle of Occam’s razor, are always to be preferred. If, for example, we live next door to a famous magician and hear dead silence from his side of the dividing wall for a long while, we can explain that in many ways: the neighbor may have dissolved into thin air, or he may have transformed himself into a paper clip, or he may have gone up to heaven through his window. We would tend to take refuge, however, in the quite commonplace explanation: that he simply left the house quietly and unperceived. Only when that hypothesis proves wrong are we compelled to look for another, and less banal, one.
These are the standpoints from which we negotiate the encounter with the visitors.[19] In regard to the landing, a distinction must be made between what the aliens left in the Zones and the way in which they did this. In the opinion of Dr. Pilman, who expresses the outlook of most specialists, the gap between the civilizations turned out to be too great for human beings alone to be able to surmount it; the other side, however, failed to give its assistance. What the visitors have left behind human beings can deal with only as fragments of a strange technology whose functioning is incomprehensible. As for the manner in which the visitors bequeath the so-called objects to men, Dr. Pilman’s thesis — which is central to the story since the title on the cover already anticipates it — represents this to us in the form of a parable. Mankind finds itself in the situation of animals which, having crept from their hiding places to a roadside or clearing where incomprehensible creatures have stayed, rummage around among the remains of the campsite. This analogy expresses Pilman’s honest conviction, even though in his conversa
tion with Noonan he enumerates other going hypotheses about the landing. Dr. Pilman is not just anyone; he has finally received the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the “Pilman Radiant.” At the same time, he is a misanthrope — as outstanding scholars frequently are. Such men strongly sense the ambiguity of their societal role. For civilized society, which is brought forth from the fruits of their thinking, they are indispensable; yet it treats them quite inconsiderately. The political powers expropriate their discoveries, but public opinion nonetheless makes the researchers themselves answerable for the consequences of that expropriation. An awareness of this situation does not dispose one toward kindliness. Instead it arouses either rebellion or cynicism; but whoever finds rebellion useless and cynicism repugnant tries to behave like a stoic. Such a person gets used to choosing the lesser evil; and when one tries to corner him with questions, he answers evasively or with sarcasm. This is precisely Dr. Pilman’s attitude, a primarily defensive stance which he has assumed in the interview with which the story begins.
In his conversation with Noonan, Pilman is certainly less spitefully laconic than he is with journalists. Because he is talking confidentially to someone he knows -besides which he is somewhat inebriated — he inclines toward straightforwardness. That Pilman, as he is psychologically delineated by his judgments on the landing, is by the same token not unbiased is another matter. The simile of leftovers from a picnic which he has availed himself of may accurately reflect the situation of human beings vis-à-vis the things found in the Zone; but in respect to the visitors it is all too lenient. The so-called leftovers, objects that are dangerous to all living beings, were not after all thrown away in some deserted spot. They were tossed into the middle of a city. It is a fact that urban areas do not amount to even one percent of earth’s surface. That is why, though the cosmos has been “throwing” meteors at the earth for millennia, so far no meteor has fallen on a city. It would seem, then, that the landing in Harmont was not the work of chance. One could suppose that the visitors landed in the city because they wanted to. They held their picnic not on a roadside or in a deserted clearing, but right on top of our heads. The event thereby appears in another light. There is, after all, a difference between sitting down for a picnic near an ant hill, and pouring gasoline from the car over the ant hill and setting it on fire. The roadside picnic of Pilman’s friendly analogy presupposes total indifference to the fate of the human ants. The picture of deliberate destruction, on the other hand, presupposes a high level of ill will, since one would really have to take the trouble of coming from far off in order to destroy the ant hill. Indifference and malevolence are not the same thing; and in this regard it is unfortunate that the story is silent as to whether even one of the other landings took place in a human settlement.
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