I originally read Roadside Picnic as a teen, which, at the time, impressed me as an exciting sci-fi adventure. When I re-read it as a young adult, i saw it as a rather depressing tale asking the questions of sacrifice and duty.
My other favorite by Strugatskys is A Billion Years Before The End Of The World (translated as Definitely Maybe), which you can read as a somewhat humorous story involving paranormal events, or as a critique of the state suppressing unwanted research. (As far as I know, one of the brothers was involved with a dissident and questioned before writing it)
I've had similar thoughts regarding the roadside picnic, the older I am, the more depressing it feels.
I would highly recommend another Strugatskys book - 'Monday starts on Saturday', it is pure humor, as opposed to other works of theirs. It's about a soviet scientist that joins government's study on magic. Bureaucracy never been funnier, of course outside of 'The Twelve Tasks of Asterix', 1976.
Rather programmer than software engineer, I think that that time, his work was mainly just calculate something, not to write software products and such.
Incidentally, the spirit of the book fits both communistic, and hacker's views: work overtime, because you like it, not for an extra reward.
I agree. I enjoyed Roadside Picnic as its such a unique take on the ET visitation genre but my god is it depressing.
I still think it could have the potential be a really interesting TV show. Personally I think the slow nature of the book lends itself towards the show format.
Further, IIRC I believe that soviet authors/translators were able to skirt censorship for the LoTR books by wrapping them in a Sci-Fi setting. Soviet writer for science fiction are some of my favorites.
It possibly reflects on daily life in the Soviet Union. Beetle in the Anthill is even more depressing. Still, the Strugatsky brothers are two of my favourite authors.
I re-read their books every ten years or so (along with some of Philip K. Dick's) because I keep forgetting the plot and the details. The Noon Universe books, along with Roadside Picnic are quite cryptic.
Anyway, The Doomed City is considered one of their most depressing of their novels, with a feeling of hopelessness characteristic of the Brezhnev era. I've long posponed reading it due to this and the fact that it's the last of their books published in my language that I haven't read.
I read somewhere that Strugatskys were once asked whether Inhabited Island was a satire of the Soviet Union, to which they responded with something like “it was not supposed to be the Soviet Union or any country specifically, but because we lived there, that is what we inadvertently ended up writing about”
Some of the RP editions have an afterword about publishing in Soviet and evading censorship thorough Sci-fi, pretty interesting. Soviet was a strange place.
Roadside Picnic is a lovely perspective on the genre, in that it isn't at all about the zone or any supposed aliens. The zone makes for a fascinating backdrop for the story, but in the end it is about the people just trying to carve out a life while exposed to an extraordinary, incomprehensible situation grown mundane. The zone could be swapped out for a disaster area or a hostile jungle or whatever, but by being the zone it becomes very alien to the reader as well. It contributes to what I really like about the book, simply being very atmospheric and immersive. It's all show-don't-tell, the reader experiences everything through what the characters see or hear, and the reader's picture of the world is as clouded and uncertain as those living in it. I found a bit of the same feeling in Metro 2033, where anything happening outside of a couple kilometers range is just rumours. Nobody really knows anything for sure and neither does the reader!
Also there was actually a RP TV-series in production with a really cool trailer, but I think the pilot didn't take off so it shut down.
There was an NBC TV series in 2021 called Debris, canceled after 1 season, that must have taken some inspiration from Roadside Picnic (at least from what I see in this failed series trailer). It's about 2 federal agents searching for parts of an exploded alien spacecraft. It was your typical "monster of the week" while building up an overarching story. Each piece of the ship would have some unique and crazy affect on the area and/or people around it.
Roadside Picnic is probably my favorite version of alien visitation. I'm partial to stories where the aliens are largely incomprehensible. Especially the ones who can manage the high tech requirements of FTL. Felt very realistic having the aliens visit Earth as tourists and not invaders, ignore the locals, and throw their trash around.
I am also a little surprised it hasn't been made into modern show. It would perfectly fit the paradigm of the modern story arc-based show that's centered around a big mystery. But, there's some consolation when one can see the influence of Roadside Picnic on other shows. Seems like it was a big influence on Lost.
A Billion Years Before The End Of The World is neither humorous nor it can be dumbed down and framed as "a critique of the state suppressing unwanted research". It's one of their later and more complex works.
A critique of the state messing with research is "the tale of Troika", and it's also a weird, weak-ish book (it also comes in a pair, not unlike Janus Poluektovich).
You've got to love Roadside Picnic as it can be seen as the predecessor to other stories and games, like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Escape from Tarkov. It's core trope is unique enough to have spawned an entire generation of content.
I'd say the same about Blindsight, but it hasn't spawned much. Although, it's core trope is arguably the most unique I've ever read before.
I think you are talking about second Prey game, not the first. First Prey game was unusual first person shooter, very interesting one. I haven't played second game.
[EDIT] It'd also have been pretty weird if the '06 Prey had seemed like it had some Blindsight DNA, since that novel was released a few months after the '06 Prey. And I don't want to overstate the connection, but it's enough that I'm reasonably sure that someone involved in writing '17 Prey had read Blindsight.
[EDIT AGAIN] In fact, I'd literally bet money someone involved had also read a certain Watts short story in addition to Blindsight, which story I hesitate to even name for super-spoilery reasons.
I was not able to finish Blindsight. It is too pretentious for me, it ignores what state of art was at the time. Let me quote an old comment [1] of mine:
Do you know that current 1sqkm radio telescopes produce data that can't be processed at real time in any cluster environment in use at 2015-2016? They scan skies at precision I just cannot express in words, let's try math.
"...with a resolution of few micro-angular-seconds..."
sin(5/57/60/60/1000000) equals to 2.4366472e-11. It is sine of roughly 5 micro angular seconds (1 radian is about 57 degrees). 1/sin(5/57/60/60/1000000) is roughly equal to distance where current SKA can distinguish 1 meter radio-emitting object and it equals to about 41 million kilometers - a fourth of the distance between Sun and Earth.
These Firefall objects just won't be "unnoticeable until their entry to the atmosphere" in the state of the art sky scaling systems of Blindsight's time.
Despite me being very unrespectful to Watts works, I recognize his influence. So, what is this Blindsight-related-story you are talking about? I read many of them and I cannot remember any that resembles your description.
I agree about Definitely Maybe, or, rather, I disagree that it can be read as humorous, but can't agree more that it's great, considering its philosophical or psychological depth.
Haven't read Roadside Picnic, but I've seen Tarkovsky's Stalker several times. How do they compare? Stalker on it's own is an amazing piece of art. The Stalker in the monologue at the end laments that no one believes anymore (this seems to be Tarkovksy's critique of materialism and probably got him in trouble with the Soviet censors) - it can also be seen as depressing, but there's that bit at the very end when Stalker's daughter does that telekinesis thing which can be seen as being a bit hopeful for the future.
I always thought that Stalker is pretty much the Soviet version of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both are really good, but by modern standards extremely slow.
Stalker is only very loosely based on the Roadside Picnic universe, since you like you movie you should definitely give the book a go.
they are similar yet very different. Stalker focuses on a single journey into the Zone, Rodaside picnic focuses on the life and world surrounding the zone. I've always said that Roadside Picnic is dark realist SciFi that dabbles in Philosophy, while Stalker is Philosopy that dabbles in dark realist SciFi.
Reading Pelevin without knowing the cultural context is absolutely pointless. His books consist of references to movies, books, historical events, anecdotes, fairy tales, folklore songs, and many other elements of cultural heritage. I emphasize: his books consist of references, not just have them. Stories are based on intersections of meanings of different references.
Pelevin is not a sci-fi writer, and Pelevin is anything but a “soviet” writer. Pelevin is a 100% anti-soviet writer.
You can add “The Doomed City” to the list as well. It's an interesting take on the “aliens pull people from different places and times to conduct a social experiment” trope.
My favorite Soviet/Eastern Bloc scifi novel is The Day Lasts More Than A Hundred Years (1981) by Chingiz Aitmatov.
"Ethnic" writers were accorded more freedom of topic than white Russians, confined to village prose in the Breznev era. Aitmatov's book sweeps the vast steppes of Central Asia and interstellar space, begins from the perspective of a fox, considers traumas of the Great Patriotic War and Stalin's resettlement, thousand-year-old traditions, the quest to give a dead railroad switchman a proper Muslim burial, and an international incident caused in space.
Aitmatov was ethnically Kyrgyz. The book's mostly set on Kazakh steppes.
OP was looking for context on the meat-grinder in Ukraine. He won't find it in the meat-grinder near the end of Roadsite Picnic.
Sienkiewicz (1884), With Fire and Sword, set in 1640s-1650s Khmelnytsky Uprising (Cossacks of Zaporozhian Sich vs Polish-Lithuanian empire) is remarkably good, and geographically contiguous with the current meat grinder in Ukraine. A pre-Soviet book from outside what became USSR (Polish), not scifi, but which clearly inspired Frank Herbert and possibly Tolkein. Scifi and fantasy continued the adventure genre, after all. If you read it, be prepared for Iliad or The Bridge on the Drina-level violence at times.
For more non-scifi lit grounded in war in previous iterations of Ukrainian statehood, see especially Bulgakov's (1925) The White Guard. A love song to Kiev, loving and complex critique of its bourgeoisie that could only have been written by a physician.
Roadside Picnic's a fast-paced philosophical read. Solaris (yes it's Polish, but Tarkovsky painted it in film) has the dreamy, encyclopedic quality of something like Moby-Dick. (Post-Soviet) Metro 2033 is lower quality, more pulpy, feels like it was written to be turned into a series, video game, etc. (it was), but it's an interesting page-turner.
Macmillan publisher's Best of Soviet Science Fiction series was a fantastic set of translations, which included novels and short stories: https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pubseries.cgi?1107
Well, it was actually written after the revolution and the so-called "War communism" phase of the 1918-1921 Russia. To me it's more of a study on how the collectivist "paradise" would work after it works out its growing pains.
Things got ironed out quite a bit, the fifties and sixties were really good. Cuban Revolution, suddenly there was sugar in the kitchen. Big sugar rations! Increased rations! Then later increased even more! And while yes basically they were poor they were at least all equally poor, that is a much better outcome. They had privacy from Capitalism (weren't getting big data analytics extracted from them), and plus, Russians never made the big bucks off their expansion, never cashed in on it. Unlike everybody else ever.
Fifties and sixties weren't really collectivist (neither was any time except for the war communism of 1918-1921 for that matter). Individual citizens had private property.
Always always there's private property, always, like it is not about whether you own your own underwear it's more about who owns the means of production. And further I highly question sources I don't personally read in Russia, in Russian, because if you read it in English in Oceania you're reading what the defectors say. 100% pure defector speech. Why would a Russian Communist suck up to the West and write in American English? Or a Chilean Marxist, would he speak American English that ordinary Americans could read? How could that ever come about? There's tons of Chileans who are very talented and got offers to study or work in USA and they learned enough American to say "FUCK THAT SHIT!"
Why? Because they consider America the culprit of 9/11, you know 9/11, nine eleven, nine eleven. The 9/11 bombings. The 9/11 bombings and terrorism. The 9/11 bombings and terrorism that were commemorated 38 years later with similar direct deaths and highly monument-specific bombs, as a retaliation for 9/11. 3000 dead, 3000 dead, no children, no children, monument, monument, capital, capital, terrorism, terrorism. Nine eleven.
I had the privilege to read most of those books long time ago, but the best and pretty much the only one I reread every few years is "The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov...
Even now as an adult, sometimes I would dream that I can fly in the same way as Margot flew on top of the streets in Moscow...
It is just one of the greatest books ever, but I am not sure it can be fully understood and appreciated by people that did not spent some time behind the iron curtain...
Has anybody tried original books but translated by Google? Some Eastern Bloc Literature is suffering from bad translations, because artsy or political ambitions of woke westerns commies. Solaris in particular.
> I am a citizen of the sentence first and foremost, and so when I read Pelevin uncorking a massive, soaring line from within Omon’s young consciousness, I did not think: “does this qualify as Soviet if it’s about the Soviet space program but it’s published in 1991?”
I think he's either intellectually lazy or dishonest vis a vis my other comments. Even the publishing date in this case is suspect, every single source I could find it lists it as 1992 and not 1991.
Either way I'd expect better from someone who is an University teacher.
> PATRICK MCGINTY (...) teaches in the Department of Languages, Literatures, Cultures, and Writing at Slippery Rock University
This is a great comment to illustrate how ideology (especially various brands of nationalism) destroys genuine dialog. Instead of talking about the writers and their works people are now talking about which pigeonhole each writer belongs to. Not because those pigeonholes improve anyone's understanding of the books, mind you. It's a matter of taking credit for their works and applying those credits to the current meta-narrative.
Nope. We are all products of our culture. Our parents, our upbringing, education in school. Our friends. Our first experiences, and of course, the ideology that we have obtained during the process. The ideology mostly comes built into the society's culture, education and work life. So there is no such thing as 'ideologically neutral' or "I don't have an ideology". Its just that people think that the ideology that they have is 'normal', and they don't identify it as an ideology unless it conflicts with the incumbent ideology in the society.
Yes, although sometimes people feel their country is not normal. "In a normal country, this would not happen," many Russian people said, especially in the '90s between Yeltsin's US-backed coup and the 1998 collapse.
Definitely, that is the case. Sometimes societies start going down a route that is totally in contrast with what ideology that people have been conditioned to. And this is not even about USSR - at the moment, many people in places like US are experiencing the same thing, with a Randian dystopia taking over from the former center-right capitalism as capitalism in those countries finally goes back to its late 19th century roots. So the new state of the society is way too different from the state of the society that shaped these people's ideologies. And they are totally appalled.
Soviet Union's case is an exception to this: The Soviets were literally brainwashed by Hollywood movies and bootleg CIA video tapes to believe that everybody in the capitalist west lived like how the rich lived in Manhattan. They thought that they would keep all the good stuff from socialism (guaranteed jobs, reasonable pay, housing, free education, higher education, healthcare, reasonable retirement etc) but would also get the consumerism and the glamor depicted in Hollywood movies. They learned that things don't work that way.
Even until recently, there were Russians who still didn't know that there were homeless in the US. The Internet has likely changed that though...
Difference between Polish and Soviet is not tiny pidgeon hole difference. It is giving proper attribution. Not everything was done by Soviet. And for that matter, Soviet does not mean Russian automatically either.
And specifically, Poland was occupied by Soviet long enough to deserve not tonhave own art attributes to them.
Also, literature before revolutions and after them is much different. Topics, style of writing, who could get published or become famous are all much different. You can't attribute to Soviet what was done after Soviet broke up.
Yeah, it felt so wrong to see Lem up there. The fact that he was renowned in Soviet Union does not make him any Soviet. From what I've read of his works + his biography, he reminds me more of early US science-fiction writers than any of soviet ones.
This is only if you discount his early works such as The Magellanic Cloud, where he is a world communism adept wearing rose-coloured glasses, through which many of his readers, including ones in core Soviet Union, would perceive reality and future prospects.
Eastern European writers did contribute a sizeable bookshelf of writings about bright space communist future, until it began to turn sour. One lesser-known one who I remember from my childhood is Pavel Vezhinov's Death of Ajax.
UPD: Maybe we should use Eastern Bloc Science Fiction as a term?
Polish in birth and in spirit, a Soviet writer by location duing his more productive years:
> Lem was born in 1921 in Lwów, interwar Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine)
> In 1945, Lwow was annexed into the Soviet Ukraine, and the family, along with many other Polish citizens, was resettled to Kraków, where Lem, at his father's insistence, took up medical studies at the Jagiellonian University.
> After the war, under the Polish People's Republic (officially declared in 1952), the intellectual and academic community of Kraków came under complete political control. The universities were soon deprived of printing rights and autonomy.[79] The Stalinist government of Poland ordered the construction of the country's largest steel mill in the newly-created suburb of Nowa Huta.[80] The creation of the giant Lenin Steelworks (now Sendzimir Steelworks owned by Mittal) sealed Kraków's transformation from a university city into an industrial centre.
It's a stretch, but not by much, to consider Lem as someone who spent time under the Soviet umbrella.
That's a mighty stretch you try to construct. Born in Poland, lived in Poland, just had the bad luck for being there during times when soviets cough cough russians were taking whatever want, and terrorizing the rest.
For most Polish people this would be quite an insult even disregarding current war waged by russia just next to them, which is pretty much impossible to ignore if you live there.
But wasn't Poland occupying the city from 1918-1939? It was Austro-Hungarian city beforehand?
Also I wouldn't characterize Soviet occupation as bad luck and Polish as a heaven on earth.
Yes, he was born in 1921, 3 years after Polish army invaded the city and terrorized it. I don't know enough history about the period until 1939, but just extrapolating 1918 events to the whole period of Polish occupation.
Lwów was probably most Polish city in the region, and generally what's now Western Ukraine had skewed towards polish in cities and ukrainian in rural areas.
In reality, for as late as 1939 the main differences were language and religion, and considerable chunk of rural population considered themselves "locals" not linking with nation-state idea.
This reflects on Commonwealth being rather multi-ethnic and Austro-Hungarian occupation and repression changing little on the areas they took.
Eastern and Central European history has less stable borders/states than Western/Northern Europeans and Americans often assume. Nationalities existed under various empires without much state-aspirational nationalism until the 19th century. People practicing various religions, speaking various languages lived under changing lords or free in the wild fields, then fled en masse in times of conflict and lived somewhere else. Forced mass-conversions and massacres changed demographics a number of times over the last thousand years. Bureaucracies remained largely intact through their posession by empires, soviets, then nation(ish)-states.
Modern states in the region are real, but contingent, and shouldn't falsely be projected backwards through history.
That's why I mentioned the idea of "locals" - apparently during census in interwar Poland, some rural regions especially in modern West Ukraine had as much as over 20% declaring their nationality as just "locals".
Weird to see you accuse someone of intellectual dishonesty, and then turn around and take a quote out of context to throw a dig at somebody else, purely because you don't agree. Very shameful behavior, honestly.
I'm sorry if the response was blunt, nevertheless people really have to take a responsibility for their education and not make inflammatory comments about history of the parts of the world they don't understand or are unwilling to understand.
There is plenty of information regarding history of Lviv and this region in general. It's long and sad, tragic and sometimes beautiful but never simple.
Besides, I found that most people who feign ignorance know history very well and use it for their own agenda. If you know what to search in someone post history it becomes more or less obvious.
FWiW I have a couple of good friends | past co-workers from Poland in addition to one fairly influential teacher (I'm in Australia) and understand the history and absolutely not Soviet aspect of this argument.
The phrase "Soviet Writer" can be treated more loosely though and can be taken to embrace those that wrote about or had their writing influenced by Soviet events and it's difficult to imagine Lem not being aware of nor affected by the social upheaval radiating out from the formation of the USSR.
His identity is Polish, his writing contains elements that stem from | react to Soviet history and culture .. it's hard to write and not be affected by loud neighbours that raid your kitchen and stomp on your belongings.
"Soviet Block" maybe the correct expression. I (somehow) enjoyed subtle nuances they injected in opposition of Soviet Rule.
But it did not go unnoticed. I remember very particular Russian TV-series about Arctic Explorers on Finnish TV, which censored scenes where the crew ignored stupid
and repulsive Communist Party official.
The protestors in Russia (the small number which is still on the streets) likely did not read any Soviet Sci-Fi at all. What they read is Harry Potter.
The parable from Soviet Sci-Fi to the current events is quite confusing. It's an attempt to create a narrative where there isn't.
Russia has some truly great fantasy series of their own. I never tire of recommending Lukyanenkos Night Watch series. Especially in contrast to trope heavy feel good stuff like Harry Potter that falls back to the heroic fight against ultimate villains. In contrast even the magic system of Night Watch throws the difficulty of the shades of grey in your face. Its especially nice that the whole thing starts as black and white as you can get with the protagonist developing throughout the whole series.
edit: Only read it in German, so not sure about the English translation
I get it, but people calling themself Russian opposition today are oblivious to any shades of grey. For them, Lukyanenko is a vatnik (a popular ethno-political slur not unlike "redneck") and nazi, case closed. Same with his comrade SF writer Oleg Divov. There are no shades of grey in political twitter. If Lukyanenko dies tomorrow, it would be a loud celebration for Russian opposition, whatever is left of it - another Putin's rag quacked. Like they celebrated the death of Darya Dugina and posted ironic memes about that.
I could recommend them a Russian (or Ukrainian) writer or two who are likely sharing their world views today, but they just aren't the booky type in general. Why read more books when you get the knowledge of the current thing from Twitter. And the general life framework from Harry Potter. I don't even think you have to read that one to the end. Most of the memes like the magic hat are in the book one.
I would say that the low quality and race to the bottom in Russian opposition is one of the pillars that lets Putin remain in his chair uncontested. And they keep digging. They reproduce by managing to recruit a new generation of even worse youth.
"The protestors in Russia (the small number which is still on the streets) likely did not read any Soviet Sci-Fi at all. What they read is Harry Potter."
>The protestors in Russia (the small number which is still on the streets) likely did not read any Soviet Sci-Fi at all.
They are living in it. Right now they moved from the chapters in the "Inhabited Island/Prisoners of Power" describing totalitarian state covered with propaganda broadcasting towers and dissent suppression into the chapter where the main characters are loaded into tanks and sent into [tactical] nukes battlefield.
The power of Dostoyevsky/Strugatskis/Pelevin (to me they are parts of the same axis, though it is hard to describe why in short post) is whatever happens (or yet to happen) in Russia you still feel like you're inside one of their novel.
This is an ample comparsion but may I remind you that Inhabited Island's plot did not resolve by the means of street protests, nor did it resolve at all even after the regime fell?
That is the point. Post Putin Russia isn't going to magically change and become a happy place. Society can't change overnight and humans can't significantly, if any, expand their mental horizon fast (even when it is supposedly advanced humans and society of the the future and when presented with tremendously wonderful new aspects of reality) - that goes through several Strugatskis works (Hard to be a God, Roadside Picnic, Anthill, The Waves Extinguish the Wind)
I can't say that Putin's Russia is a particularly unhappy place, especially taking into account the bad things one carries inside and will surely transplant wherever they land. And compared to the thing the world now wants to build here, which is also described in post-soviet social fiction.
In Inhabited Island, Maxim takes some time to ponder whether the society he appeared in is actually unhappy and needs any help, considering its level of develoment.
> The protestors in Russia (the small number which is still on the streets) likely did not read any Soviet Sci-Fi at all
Yeah, that's completely false. As someone who has been on these streets and it these political circles for a LONG time, I can with confidence tell you that vast majority were familiar with at least most (if not all) writers in that list.
My other favorite by Strugatskys is A Billion Years Before The End Of The World (translated as Definitely Maybe), which you can read as a somewhat humorous story involving paranormal events, or as a critique of the state suppressing unwanted research. (As far as I know, one of the brothers was involved with a dissident and questioned before writing it)