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

stable of science fiction talent ever seen, he would throw out challenges to his writers, like: "Write me a
story about a man who will die in twenty-four hours unless he can answer this question: 'How do you
know you're sane?' "; and this oneтАФsurely one of the most provocative of all: "Write me a story about a
creature that thinks as well as a man but not like a man." (The answer "Woman" is disallowed as too
obvious a rejoinder.)
The Strugatskys posit that the Earth experiences a brief visit from extraterrestrials, who leave behind
themтАФwell, call it litter, such as might be left by you and me (in one of our less socially conscious
moments) after a roadside picnic. The nature of these discards, products of an utterly alien technology,
defies most earthly logic, to say nothing of earthly analytical science, and their potential is limitless. Warp
these potentials into all-too-human goalsтАФthe quest for pure knowledge for its own sake, the search for
new devices, new techniques, to achieve new heights in human well-being; the striving for profit, with its
associated competitiveness; and the ravening thirst for new and more terrible weaponsтАФand you have
the framework of this amazing short novel. Add the Strugatskys' deft and supple handling of loyalty and
greed, of friendship and love, of despair and frustration and loneliness, and you have a truly superb tale,
ending most poignantly in what can only be called a blessing. You won't forget it.
Tale of a Troika is a very different thing indeedтАФso different that it might have been written by quite
different authorsтАФwhich is the highest possible tribute to the authors' versatility. How much you like it
will depend on your taste for satire and lampoon. It is, in nature, reminiscent of Lem's Memoirs Found
in a Bathtub, with (and here I confess to a highly subjective evaluation) one important difference: Lem's
approach and style are, in comparison, unleavened, no matter how deeply he plunges into the surrealistic
and the absurd. The cumulative effect is Kafkaesque horror. The Strugatsky furyтАФand it is fury: disgust
with hypocrisy, with bureaucratic bumbling, with self-serving, self-saving distortions of logic and of truth
and of initially decent human motivationsтАФtheir fury is laced with laughter, rich with scorn, effervescent
with the comic spirit. One has to search back to Alice's tea party to find a scene as mad as the chamber
of the Troika; yet, in retrospect, one realizes that one has experienced a profoundly serious work, since
every bent line illuminates a straight one, all illogic signifies the purity from which it has departed.
A word of appreciation must be extended to Ms. Antonina W. Bouis, the translator of these short
novels. Russian I do not know; fiction I do; and I must honor anyone who can so deftly pass emotion,
character dimension, even conversational idiom, through so formidable a barrier.

тАФTheodore Sturgeon San Diego, California 1976


Roadside Picnic
You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to
make it out of.
тАФRobert Penn Warren


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FROM AN INTERVIEW BY A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT FROM HARMONT RADIO
WITH DOCTOR VALENTINE PILMAN, RECIPIENT OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS
FOR 19..
"I suppose that your first serious discovery, Dr. Pilman, should be considered what is now called the
Pilman Radiant?"
"I don't think so. The Pilman Radiant wasn't the first, nor was it serious, nor was it really a discovery.
And it wasn't completely mine, either."
"Surely you're joking, doctor. The Pilman Radiant is a concept known to every schoolchild."
"That doesn't surprise me. According to some sources, the Pilman Radiant was discovered by a
schoolboy. Unfortunately, I don't remember his name. Look it up in Stetson's History of the