"Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Roadside Picnic (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

names of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. I first encountered these talented
brothers in a novel called Hard to Be a Cod 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 ... ?" 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 any-
body. 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. . . . 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 great- est
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 one--surely 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 them--well, 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, pro- ducts 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 goals--the 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
weapons--and 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 indeed--so different that it
might have been written by quite different authors--which 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 fury--and 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 motivations--their fury is laced with