the madszine

‘There are subjects which cannot be entirely exhausted,’[33] comments Stanislaw Lem on the Strugatsky brothers’ dystopian science fiction novel Roadside Picnic. And similarly, there are subjects which cannot be entirely defined. The descriptive process is particularly complicated when applied to abstract concepts such as progress and freedom, but Lem uses the example of God to ask, ‘how can one definitively report on something which is, by definition, inexhaustible?’[34] For theologians, the concept of God means so many different things that it has ‘infinite qualities,’[35] whereas ‘description presumes a limit.’[36] Progress and freedom are similarly boundless concepts that defy a singular definition, and can be manipulated by politically tyrannical regimes with unlimited ambitions for power.

Progress is an ideological notion which comes from humanity’s agreed understanding of history – for instance, technological advances since the nineteenth century. However, a definition of progress as technological advance has its dystopian dangers. Throughout history the application of technology has been shaped by the wants and needs of the already powerful, increasing the potency of totalitarian regimes. Furthermore, it encompasses the application of conceptual knowledge for achieving practical goals and, as such, the products of such efforts. Therefore, under the political-economic capitalist system, progress is collectively agreed to be rooted in its constitutive element of consumption and is, therefore, controlled by private owners acting in their own interests under, and empowered, by political authority.[37]

Consumption is characterised by commodification and the excessive preoccupation of society with the purchase of goods and services, and structured desires to create unnecessary needs by these politically-empowered private owners.[38] It is hardly the utopian ideal implied by capitalist advocates’, such as Milton Friedman, belief that capitalist progress frees us all. Marcuse goes as far as to suggest that capitalism is a state of ‘unfreedom,’[39] as the choice between two products to consume is not the same as ‘a meaningful choice of whether or not to participate in…the first place.’[40] And capitalist progress does not necessarily relate to meaningful change or a realisation of envisaged utopias.[41] There is a progression (from previous ages), but humanity equating that to freedom can prevent meaningful change under exploitative and politically tyrannical regimes. Such “progress” (defined as the advances that capitalism’s indirect system of governance brings about) is challenged by Jameson’s Progress Versus Utopia, which commits only to saying that capitalism will eventually come to ‘some future terminus of human development which we sometimes call “progress.”’[42]

Roadside Picnic focuses on humans dealing with the aftermath of an alien visitation. The aliens leave behind strange artefacts in Visitation Zones across the world, which results in a notable Soviet-Russian reference surrounding their tight control by a government fearful of unforeseen consequences. It is an interpretation that links the alien artefacts to subversive capitalism, according to Michael Andre-Driussi. A subculture of stalkers evolves, scavengers who enter the Zones to steal the artefacts for profit. They are  ‘smugglers’[43] and the alien artefacts represent the ‘lipstick, blue jeans, and rock music – items of everyday Western “decadence” that worked their way into the USSR and “polluted” it.’[44] The world of the Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic, is depicted as ‘coarse, cruel, and hopeless, [and], that was how it had to be.’[45] It is a dystopian world of decaying capitalist idealism, regressing freedoms, and the ‘[triumph of] bourgeois ideology’[46] as a communist utopian solution.

Stalkers like Red, who operate in and around an indirectly government-controlled Zone in Harmont (a fictitious town), attempt to save themselves from capitalist-induced poverty (through worker exploitation) by risking their lives to steal and sell the artefacts. Far from the capitalist ideology of progressive freedom, and towards the end of Roadside Picnic, Red rhetorically asks, ‘how can I give up stalking when I have a family to feed?’[47] The fact that he does not expect an answer depicts how little choice Red feels he has. He is forced to work by poverty, but refuses to work for the government-sanctioned capitalist companies that control the zones. Voicing his political dissent, Red says, ‘If a man works with [them], he is always working for one of [them], he is a slave and nothing else.’[48] He is trapped in a totalitarian political landscape, exploiting its workers (turning labourers like Red into ‘machines’[49]) and restricting freedoms (to move and think). Indeed, Red is horrified to realise that ‘[he has] never had a thought in [his] entire life’[50] in a ‘society that didn’t let [him] learn how to think.’[51]

The political structure of the Strugatskys’ fictional Harmont, therefore, stifles both meaningful change and freedom (including freedom of thought). The excessive centralisation of power and the heavy-handed control needed to maintain it, depicts Harmont as a bleak future dystopia driven to the brink by totalitarian capitalism. This descent into dystopia is, Jameson suggests, due to science fiction (as a product of society) being incapable of imagining a progressive future outside of capitalism. Indeed, he suggests that ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.’[52]

Though not apocalyptic, Roadside Picnic is described by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay as ‘a fable of the despair of the ’60s Russian intelligentsia facing the complete destruction of the Soviet reform movement.’[53] He sees the introduction of the alien artefacts to the human world (or the metaphorical meeting of the Soviet Union and Western worlds) as ‘global acquiescence to purely material satisfactions and the abdication of all higher moral purposes.’[54] In other words, the reluctant acceptance of capitalism over the “higher morality” of Soviet utopianism – or ‘the victory of ‘realism’[55] over ‘utopian idealism.’[56] Stephen Potts argues in The Second Marxian Invasion that ‘of all the works of the Strugatsky brothers, Roadside Picnic provides the strongest criticism of the capitalist ethic.’[57] By following Red’s life in Harmont, it warns against the exploitation of workers by the centralised power that fuels totalitarian capitalism and the passivity of acceptance.

However, Roadside Picnic can be read as condemnation of ideology in both the US and the Soviet Union. Although the Zone and its alien artefacts can easily be read as a capitalist symbol of humanity’s insatiable greed for control and power, the conditions inside the Zone (dark, dangerous, and heavily guarded) are comparable to the Gulags (a network of forced labour camps for dissidents in the communist Soviet Union). The dystopian commonality here is not the economic system but the political one – totalitarianism and its inherent worker oppression. Notably, Зона (zone) is a Russian slang word meaning “prison camp” but has a dual meaning of “zone, area or district.” So, “zone” defines both the prison camps and the world outside, and they were distinguished using the terms “little zone” (for the Gulag) and “big zone” (for the world beyond). On release from the camps, prisoners continued to identify themselves as ‘inhabitants of a zone’[58] which proves, Nanci Adler suggests, ‘how deeply ingrained’[59] their oppression was. In Roadside Picnic too, the Zone is policed and the world beyond it controlled by a totalitarian government. For example, citizens living near the Zone are moved on just as the government of the Soviet Union forcibly displaced its citizens to other zones (1930-1952). 

The Strugatskys’ finally break through the dystopian totalitarianism of Roadside Picnic into utopian thinking with the final line of their science fiction work – Red wishing, ‘HAPPINESS, FREE, FOR EVERYONE, AND LET NO ONE BE FORGOTTEN!’[60] It is ‘the epitome of utopianism,’[61] says Gabriel Burrow, and taken at face value it ‘looks forward to freedom and joy for everyone.’[62] Red has imagined his own personal utopia – a dream of moving to ‘a nice little cottage’[63] – that cannot be achieved due to governmental movement restrictions on Harmont’s residents. As such, Red’s ‘effort to imagine [his] utopia ends up betraying the impossibility of [him] doing so.’[64] Yet, Roadside Picnic (as is typical of its genre) ends without confirming whether his wish is granted (or not), and its open-endedness (by definition) leaves the possibility for Red to affect change meaningful to reaching his utopia.

 Footnotes
[33] Len, Stanislaw, ‘About the Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic,’ trans. by Elsa Schieder, Science Fiction Studies, 10 (3), 1983, p.317

[34] Len, p.317

[35] Len, p.317

[36] Len, p.317

[37] Caravalho, Luisa, ‘‘What is Technology?’ Business Models for Digital Economy’ Handbook of Research on Multidisciplinary Approaches to Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and ICTs, edited by Luísa Cagica Carvalho, et al., IGI Global, 2021, pp. 7

[38] Warde, Alan, ‘After Taste: Culture, Consumption and Theories of Practice,’ Journal of Consumer Culture, 14(3), 2014.

[39] Marcuse, Herbert, One Dimensional Man, (UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2002) p.3

[40] Burrow, Gabriel, ‘Humanizing Harmont: Place and Desire in Roadside Picnic,’ Foundation, 50 (140) p.5-17

[41] Beaumont, Matthew, ‘Reinterpreting Oscar Wilde’s Concept of Utopia: ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism,’’ Utopian Studies, 15 (1) 2004, p.17

[42] Jameson, Frederic, ‘Progress versus Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future?’ Science Fiction Studies, 9 (2), 1982, p.149

[43] Druissi, Michael Andre, ‘The Politics of Roadside Picnic,’ The New York Review of Science Fiction – The Hopes and Fears of All the Years, 2012 [last accessed: 03/05/2024] https://www.nyrsf.com/2013/01/the-politics-of-roadside-picnic-by-michael-andre-driussi.html

[44] Druissi, ‘The Politics of Roadside Picnic,’

[45] Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris, Roadside Picnic, trans. by Olena Bormashenko, (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2012) p.207

[46] Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris, p.207

[47] Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris, p.223

[48] Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris, p.223

[49] Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris, p.220

[50] Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris, p.223

[51] Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris, p.224

[52]Jameson, Frederic, Archaeologies of the Future, (New York: Verso Books, 2007) p.199

[53] Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, ‘Towards the Last Fairy Tale,’ Science Fiction Studies, (Greencastle, Indiana: DePauw University, 1986)

[54] Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan

[55] Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan

[56] Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan

[57] Potts, Stephen, The Second Marxian Invasion, (California: Borgo Press, 1991) p.80

[58] Adler, Nanci, The Gulag Survivor Beyond the Soviet System, (London: Routledge, 2002) p.36

[59] Adler, p.36

[60] Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris, p.224

[61] Burrow, Gabriel, ‘Humanizing Harmont: Place and Desire in Roadside Picnic,’ Foundation, 50 (140) p.5-17

[62] Burrow, p.5-17

[63] Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris, p.201

[64] Jameson, ‘Progress versus Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future?’ p.154