Microworlds

The science-fiction world must be (to put it quite plainly) a real world: that is, one in which no one is privileged from the start, in which no fate is predetermined, whether in favor of good or of evil. Since men are not angels, there is no need to ascribe angelic traits to the aliens; since men, though they kill flies, do not exactly travel to the ends of the earth to do so, similarly the aliens, even if they should regard us as flies, should not go out of their way to seek earthlings to swat.

An author who describes a life form or type of intelligence different from the terrestrial variety is in an easier position than the one who depicts a cosmic invasion of earth. The former can — as, for example, I did in Solaris — restrict himself or herself to portraying phenomena that differ as much as desired from what humans are familiar with. The latter, proceeding from the “interventionist” premise, assumes that the aliens have come to earth and that, consequently, something or other must have dictated their literally astronomical undertaking. What could their motive have been? If it was not an impulse to fight or to steal, it must have been the urge either to learn or to play (they came in order to amuse themselves a bit with us…). There are, as we see, not many alternate possibilities. Thus the best strategy for dealing with this subject, too, is to preserve forever the aliens’ mysteriousness.

I would like to stress emphatically that this strategy is not founded, either entirely or primarily, on aesthetic criteria; that, in other words, the narrative must not preserve the aliens’ mysteriousness in order continuously to puzzle readers and hold them spellbound by the great unknown. The strategy does, of course, incline to conform to the fundamental directives of conflict theory. Thus, by way of example, future-strategists at military academies are required to impute to the enemy the most threatening intentions from the point of view of the strategists’ own side. In regard to cosmic aliens, such a dictate has a cognitive, rather than a military, purport. Yet visitors fitted with absolutely inimical intentions do not represent the worst of all possible eventualities. In this case, the enemy’s attitude is at least clearly defined. The situation is worse when we absolutely cannot understand the peculiarities of their strange behavior, when we cannot explain their alien proceedings.

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