"Arkady & Boris Strugatsky - Roadside Picnic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Strugatski Arkady)

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ROADSIDE PICNIC
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky


INTRODUCTION
Good science fiction is good fiction.
This assertion is one which must be made again, and over again, until the general reader and the
"serious" critic cease to associate science fiction solely with girls in brass brassieres being rescued from
the advances of bug-eyed monsters by zap-gun-toting heroes in space armor. There is as much of a
spectrum of excellence in science fiction as there is in any other field. Mickey Spillane is not Dorothy
Sayers or Ngaio Marsh. Hopalong Cassidy is not Shane or True Grit. And the best of science fiction is
quite as good as the best of any literature.
It happens also to be the most explosively popular genre on the current scene. American and English
science fiction is widely read in France, Italy, and Scandinavia, increasingly in Spain, Portugal, and Latin
America, and is attaining new peaks in Germany and the Netherlands. New writers are appearing in
Europe, especially in France and Italy, and the translations are beginning to flow the other way into the
English-speaking world. And the rise in printed science fiction is reflected in the increasing number of
cinema and television productions in the field.
There are several reasonsтАФand a great many more hypothesesтАФfor this upsurge, but they are not
within the purview of these remarks and can be left to the dozens of postgraduate theses being written on
the subject and to the teachers of high-school and college courses in science fiction (of which there are,
at this writing, over 1,500 in the U.S.A. alone). Suffice it to say that there has never been a field of
literature so limitless, so flexible, so able to evoke astonishment and wonder, so free of the boundaries of
time and space and that arbitrary fantasy we call reality, as science fiction. Not since the invention of
poetry.
What is not generally known to the readers of science fiction in English is that the most widely read
science-fiction writer in the world is not Heinlein or Bradbury or Clarke, but Stanislaw Lem, a Pole; that
the largest science-fiction section of a writers' union is in Hungary; that excellent science fiction is being
produced in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and especially in the Soviet Union. Some of thisтАФfar too
littleтАФis beginning to trickle into the English-speaking world, and, sad to say, a certain portion suffers
from execrable translation. Some works have had the hazards of translation more than doubled by
passing from the original to a second language before being rendered from that into English, a process in
which the style and character of even a laundry list could hardly be expected to survive. Keeping that in
mind, however, the discerning reader will find, even in the most brutalized of translations, a strength and
inventiveness marvelous to behold.
In the highest echelon of Soviet science-fiction writers stand the names of Boris and Arkady
Strugatsky. I first encountered these talented brothers in a novel called Hard to Be a God. Remarkable,
purely as a novel, for structure, characterization, pacing, and its perceptive statements of the human
condition, it touches also on almost every single quality most avidly sought by the science-fiction reader.
It has space flight and future devices; it has that wondrous "what if тАж ?" aspect in its investigation into
sociology; by its richly detailed portraiture of an alien culture it affords a new perspective on the nature of
ours and ourselves; it even has that exciting hand-to-hand conflict so dear to the hearts of that cousin of
science fiction called swords-and-sorcery. And among its highest virtues is this: though there are battles
and fights and blood and death where the narrative calls for them, the super-potent protagonist never
kills anybody. Writers everywhere, keeping in mind in these violent times their responsibility for their
influence, should take note. It can be done, and done well, at no expense to tension and suspense.
And now comes Roadside Picnic тАж In the so-called Golden Age of American science fiction, when
the late John W. Campbell, editor extraordinary, gathered around him in a handful of months the greatest