Boris Strugatsky (1933–2012)

An (unspecified) time ago spaceships landed in several places along the same latitude. They stayed a very short while and then left, but in their wake they left . . . depending on your point of view, potentially miraculous technology or fatally dangerous trash. Not normal trash, but objects and slime that burns, and and spatial anomalies that can tear a person apart and . . . the list goes on and on. But some of the stuff is unbelievably useful even if people have no idea how any of these show more objects (say, batteries) that never run out of power and, if encouraged even multiply!. In this (unspecified) country, not the Soviet Union, and western culturally, a black market thrives alongside the governmental research agencies despite all efforts to curb them. Stalkers, if they aren't immediately killed, gradually learn their way around and to recognize potentially useful things. The aliens made no attempt to communicate with the humans and Why Not? is a burning issue. Is this a test? Was this just a casual stop, a look around, or even, as is suggested, no more than what humans used to sometimes do in a rest area, eat a picnic and dump all the trash cluttering up their car or camper and take off. Maybe they never even noticed there was anything remotely like a civilization. Maybe we aren't even close yet (if ever). I loved everything in the novel: Redrick Schuhart is a fully rounded person (somewhat unusual in SF until more recently, it must be admitted--and this came out in 1972) and many minor characters are developed exactly as necessary, the dialogue is excellent (in all good translations, Russian dialogue tends to be good), the plot is perfect and intertwines with the thematic/philosophical content. Also -- the novel barely feels dated perhaps because the emphasis on people as they are is so true and ever-unchanging. I've often wondered if we aren't insane thinking that some alien culture might be delighted with us. In this one, it's clear to me, anyway, that we are beneath notice. Just. Wow. ***** show less

A strange, slightly halting novel, essentially composed of four days' narrative across eight years. I picked this up after hearing the excellent episode on it for the Backlisted podcast, having also seen Tarkovsky's film Stalker several times and thinking, generally, I might find it interesting.

And interesting it definitely is, although the book manages to be both like and unlike what I had anticipated. Since Backlisted made some overt comparisons to Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation, I had show more perhaps expected more of a tonal similarity: the creeping horror and dread, the sense that the characters' senses may be betraying them. There's a little bit of that here, but it's consumed much more in a kind of crushingly banal hopelessness. Why did the aliens come? No one knows. Will they be back? No one knows. What does it all mean? No one knows. Does anyone care about anything anymore? No one knows... It's a very bleak narrative, all the more so because the characters are aware it will probably get even bleaker. The horror isn't creeping: it's everywhere.

i think a much stronger point of comparison would be the contemporaneous novels of Philip K. Dick. Dick had a peculiar way of depicting a world that was always about 15% out of joint, mostly quite recognizable but with new ideas or concepts introduced a terribly offhand manner. There were rarely any "establishing shots" in a Dickian novel; you were left to grasp at thin pieces of description or make guesses from context clues. That kind of thing is all over Roadside Picnic: what's hell slime? What's prickly heat? Who's the Gopher? Why is someone named Four-Eyes? Is a "reanimated corpse" slang, or a literal description? You get some sort of answer for all of these, but sometimes they're half-answers, and sometimes they're almost non-answers, where you're left to make terrible assumptions of your own based on a few fragments of data.

is it a good book? Well, this modern 2003 translation reads easily, and it definitely leaves you thinking. But a lot of its "appeal" is in depicting people at their most basic, trying to survive in a world they don't understand, trying to comprehend and sometimes ignore its inherent bleakness. There's a powerful metaphor there, so yes, I think it's fair to say it's a good book and one that will stick with you a while. But it'd also be reasonable for you to put down the book at the end and say, "Is that all there is?" The plot really isn't very much, or terribly important. It's the overall effect of it, and the unanswered questions of it, and the melancholy of it, that will stick with you. show less

This book had been on my TBR for a long while. The back cover claims the Strugatsky brothers were the greatest science fiction writers of the Soviet era, so I was a little embarrassed to have not read them yet. Once I picked it up, I read the whole thing over my birthday weekend.

It starts out as almost a comedy of errors. Malianov, an astrophysicist, is on the brink of a breakthrough, but every time he sits down to work on his paper, a bigger and more demanding distraction interrupts him -- show more from wrong numbers to a surprise food delivery to neighbors dropping by to a criminal investigation. It starts to get suspicious when the friends drop in, who also have strange tales of interruptions and roadblocks sidetracking them from taking on bold new work. Things rapidly progress to competing conspiracy theories and alien vs. governmental control, and strong disagreements on whether it is safe, or if there is even a point to resist.

The story is very Soviet in nature and also sometimes Kafka-esque. There ends up being some meditating on the ties that bind -- those who have wives (of course only wives in this story, there are no female or LGBTQ scientists or engineers) and children and those who don't -- and how that impacts who has the luxury of both resistance and also dedicating themselves to research.

Messy, sometimes madcap, sometimes sinister. Always interesting. show less

I'll say this about the Strugatsky Brothers: They had *fearless* imaginations, tempered by fearful souls that quailed before publishing this nihilistic, absurdist, deeply subversive book in Soviet Russia. Completed in 1972, shelved until 1989, and published in a professional English translation only in 2016, this stateless satirical look at the amoral roots of True Belief in a System reads as well in 45's Amurruhkuh as it did in Brezhnev's USSR.

Voronin, our astronomer-turned-state-official, show more is an ideal. He is every system's beloved child, the True Believer who makes excuses and finds reasons instead of asking, "...the fuck...? Are they kidding with this?" As experience teaches him to question, he sidesteps. He changes his beliefs without batting an eyelash, a clue to his essential hollowness. For all that he is an eager participant in all the City's shifts of philosophical direction, the reason he can do so remains unexamined: He's complicit in the acts of the State, not driven by a desire to enact a Vision. His lack of an inner compass is rather amusing given that almost the entire novel is an internal monologue. I myownself found this a delightful twist, enjoying the musings of a centerless man as irony. Others might find that conceit wearing.

The things I found wearing were the astoundingly sexist and anti-Semitic attitudes of the characters (and, I suspect, the authors as well). There are horrible words used in connection with the two women I can recall at all...they might indeed have been the only two women mentioned, for I can summon no other woman to mind...and Katzman's presence in stereotypical fashion was not obviously played for ironic effect.

Given my track record for objecting to these facets of other older books, why am I giving this one the Full Five? Because, my friends, the story of a city between an unscalable wall and an endless abyss recommends itself to me as a parable for all of human life, and the awful attitudes of the PoV character are part and parcel of the falling, failing world that the Strugatskys were lampooning, dissecting, parodying, itemizing. These facets seem to me, even though I suspect and believe they were presented unironically, to be so much of a piece with the Experiment being ridiculed that I could easily make them objects of fun. Nonetheless they are there and merit mention lest an unsuspecting reader trip over them and feel blindsided.

Boris Strugatsky, in his Afterword, says it all and best:

How to live in conditions of ideological vacuum? How and what for? In my opinion this question remains highly relevant even today—which is why City, despite being so vehemently politicized and so categorically of its own time, potentially remains of interest to the present-day reader—provided that this reader has any interest at all in problems of this kind.

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