Roadside Picnic is better because nobody in it understands the Zone

Also a note on which translation you are holding

from Stardock Forums

Nothing in Roadside Picnic is ever explained, and that is why I keep going back to it. Aliens stopped somewhere in the countryside, left their litter behind, and moved on without noticing that anyone lived there. You never meet them. You never find out what the objects are for. The book is better for both.

What the Strugatskys spend their pages on instead is the people living at the edge of the Zone who make a living carrying things out of it. Redrick is a smuggler with a family and a shrinking set of options, not an explorer with a mission. The strangeness stays strange, and the story is about what it costs to work next to it.

It nearly did not reach print in that shape. The novel ran in a magazine in 1972, and the book edition sat blocked for years while the publisher pushed for changes the brothers would not make. What finally came out in the Soviet Union was cut. The newer English translation puts back a good deal of what that edition lost, so it is worth checking which one you are holding before you decide the prose is flat.

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Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top

The picnic is in the book though. Pillman sits there with Noonan and works the whole thing out, visitors stopped by the side of the road, had their picnic, drove off, and afterwards the small animals come out of the grass to see what got left behind. That is an explanation, and it is the one the title is named after.

What holds it together for me is that nobody who needs it ever hears it. Redrick is not in that room and would not have got much out of it if he had been. The answer exists, it just sits in a different part of the book from the man doing the dying, and that is a harder thing to pull off than leaving the question blank.

Also your line about them moving on without noticing anyone lived there is more or less Pillman's line. I think that is the part you are attached to and not the silence.

Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top

You are right and I should have said so in the first post. The picnic is Pillman's, in his conversation with Noonan, and the title comes out of it. That is an explanation sitting in the text.

What I would push on is how much it explains. Pillman offers it as a guess, and it accounts for the visitors' indifference and nothing else. It does not tell you what an empty is, or why one path through the Zone kills and the next one does not, or what the sphere does. An explanation nobody in the story can act on, offered by a man sitting safely outside the Zone, is not the same as the book accounting for itself to the reader.

And yes, the line I like is his. I had not noticed that was awkward for me. The best sentence in the novel belongs to the character doing the theorising, and it is still an image rather than an answer, which is either my point or the end of it.

Star Control: Origins
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top

You are arguing about whether the book explains itself, and I think it does both, in two different places, and on purpose.

Pillman's picnic explains the visitors. It does not explain the Zone. Those are separate questions and the novel keeps them well apart. Why they came and why they left without noticing anyone lived here is settled in that one conversation and settled fairly completely.

What an empty is, why one route through kills you and the next one does not, what any of it is for, none of that is settled anywhere. And it is the second set that the people in the book actually have to live on.

So Freia is right that the answer is in the text, and Darrow is right that it never reaches the man doing the dying. The part I would add is that the explanation is there to shut the alien story down rather than to open it up. Once you have accepted the picnic there is no first contact novel left to write. The visitors are gone, they were never interested in us, and the book is then free to be about scavengers and the people who buy from them, which is the book it wanted to be.

Withhold the picnic altogether and you have readers waiting for the aliens to come back for three hundred pages. Handing it to Pillman and to nobody else is how you get them to stop waiting, I think.