Roadside Picnic - Boris Strugatsky, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 2
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Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Roadside Picnic© Arkady and Boris Strugatsky© Translated from Russian by Antonina W. Bouis© MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc, New YorkArkadij i Boris Strugackie "Piknik na obochine"INTRODUCTIONGood science fiction is good fictionThis assertion is one which must be made again, and over again, untilthe general reader and the "serious" critic cease to associate sciencefiction solely with girls in brass brassieres being rescued from theadvances of bug-eyed monsters by zap-gun-toting heroes in space armor. Thereis as much of a spectrum of excellence in science fiction as there is in anyother field. Mickey Spillane is not Dorothy Sayers or Ngaio Marsh. HopalongCassidy is not Shane or True Grit. And the best of science fiction is quiteas good as the best of any literature.It happens also to be the most explosively popular genre on the currentscene. American and English science fiction is widely read in France, Italy,and Scandinavia, increasingly in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America, and isattaining new peaks in Germany and the Netherlands. New writers areappearing in Europe, especially in France and Italy, and the translationsare beginning to Bow the other way into the English-speaking world. And therise in printed science fiction is reflected in the increasing number ofcinema and television productions in the fieldThere are several reasons--and a great many more hypotheses-- for thisupsurge, but they are not within the purview of these remarks and can beleft to the dozens of postgraduate theses being written on the subject andto the teachers of high-school and college courses in science fiction (ofwhich there are, at this writing, over 1,500 in the U.S.A. alone). Sufficeit to say that there has never been a field of literature so limitless, soflexible, so able to evoke astonishment and wonder, so free of theboundaries of time and space and that arbitrary fantasy we call reality, asscience fiction. Not since the invention of poetry.What is not generally known to the readers of science fiction inEnglish is that the most widely read science-fiction writer in the world isnot Heinlein or Bradbury or Clarke, but Stanislaw Lem, a Pole; that thelargest science-fiction section of a writers' union is in Hungary; thatexcellent science fiction is being produced in East Germany, Czechoslovakia,and especially in the Soviet Union. Some Of this--far too little--isbeginning to trickle into the English-speak- ing world, and, sad to say, acertain portion suffers from execrable translation. Some works have had thehazards of translation more than doubled by passing from the original to asecond language before being rendered from that into English, a process inwhich the style and character of even a laundry list could hardly beexpected to survive. Keeping that in mind, however, the discerning readerwill find, even in the most brutalized of translations, a strength andinventiveness marvelous to behold.In the highest echelon of Soviet science-fiction writers stand thenames of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. I first encountered these talentedbrothers in a novel called Hard to Be a Cod Remarkable, purely as a novel,for structure, characterization, pacing, and its perceptive statements ofthe human condition, it touches also on almost every single quality mostavidly sought by the science-fiction reader. It has space flight and futuredevices; it has that wondrous "what if ... ?" aspect in its investigationinto sociology; by its richly detailed portraiture of an alien culture itaffords a new perspective on the nature of ours and ourselves; it even hasthat exciting hand-to- hand conflict so dear to the hearts of that cousin ofscience fiction called swords-and-sorcery. And among its highest virtues isthis: though there are battles and fights and blood and death where thenarrative calls for them, the super-potent protagonist never kills any-body. Writers everywhere, keeping in mind in these violent times theirresponsibility for their influence, should take note. It can be done, anddone well, at no expense to tension and suspense.And now comes Roadside Picnic. . . . In the so-called Golden Age ofAmerican science fiction, when the late John W. Campbell, editorextraordinary, gathered around him in a handful of months the great- eststable of science fiction talent ever seen, he would throw out challenges tohis writers, like: "Write me a story about a man who will die in twenty-fourhours 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 storyabout a creature that thinks as well as a man but not like a man." (Theanswer "Woman" is disallowed as too obvious a rejoinder.)The Strugatskys posit that the Earth experiences a brief visit fromextraterrestrials, who leave behind them--well, call it litter, such asmight 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 anutterly alien technology, defies most earthly logic, to say nothing ofearthly analytical science, and their potential is limitless. Warp thesepotentials into all-too-human goals--the quest for pure knowledge for itsown sake, the search for new devices, new techniques, to achieve new heightsin human well-being; the striving for profit, with its associatedcompetitiveness; and the ravening thirst for new and more terribleweapons--and you have the framework of this amazing short novel. Add theStrugatskys' deft and supple handling of loyalty and greed, of friendshipand love, of despair and frustration and loneliness, and you have a trulysuperb 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 itmight have been written by quite different authors--which is the highestpossible tribute to the authors' versatility. How much you like it willdepend on your taste for satire and lampoon. It is, in nature, reminiscentof Lem's Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, with (and here I confess to a highlysubjective evaluation) one important difference: Lem's approach and styleare, in comparison, unleavened, no matter how deeply he plunges into thesurrealistic and the absurd. The cumulative effect is Kafkaesque horror. TheStrugatsky fury--and it is fury: disgust with hypocrisy, with bureaucraticbumbling, with self-serving, self-saving distortions of logic and of truthand of initially decent human motivations--their fury is laced withlaughter, rich with scorn, effervescent with the comic spirit. One has tosearch back to Alice's tea party to find a scene as mad as the chamber ofthe Troika; yet, in retrospect, one realizes that one has experienced aprofoundly 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, thetranslator of these short novels. Russian I do not know; fiction I do; and Imust honor anyone who can so deftly pass emotion, character dimension, evenconversational idiom, through so formidable a barrier. Theodore Sturgeon SanDiego, California 1976Arkady and Boris Strugatsky Translated from Russian by Antonina W.Bouis MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc, New YorkRoadside PicnicYou have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you havegot to make it out of. * Robert Penn WarrenFROM AN INTERVIEW BY A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT FROM HARMONT RADIO WITHDOCTOR VALENTINE PILMAN, RECIPIENT OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS FOR 19.."I suppose that your first serious discovery, Dr. Pilman, should beconsidered what is now called the Pilman Radiant?""I don't think so. The Pilman Radiant wasn't the first, nor was itserious, 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 toevery schoolchild.""That doesn't surprise me. According to some sources, the PilmanRadiant was discovered by a schoolboy. Unfortunately, I don't re member hisname. Look it up in Stetson's History of the Visitation --it's described infull detail there. His version is that the radiant was discovered by aschoolboy, that a college student published the coordinates, but that forsome unknown reason it was named after me.""Yes, many amazing things can happen with a discovery. Would you mindexplaining it to our listeners, Dr. Pilman?""The Pilman Radiant is simplicity itself. Imagine that you spin a hugeglobe and you start firing bullets into it. The bullet holes would lie onthe surface in a smooth curve. The whole point of what you call my firstserious discovery lies in the simple fact that all six Visitation Zones aresituated on the surface of our planet as though someone had taken six shotsat Earth from a pistol located somewhere along the Earth-Deneb line. Denebis the alpha star in Cygnus. The Point in the heavens from which, so tospeak, the shots came is the Pilman Radiant.""Thank you, doctor. My fellow Harmonites! Finally we have heard a clear... [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl pingus1.htw.pl
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Roadside Picnic© Arkady and Boris Strugatsky© Translated from Russian by Antonina W. Bouis© MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc, New YorkArkadij i Boris Strugackie "Piknik na obochine"INTRODUCTIONGood science fiction is good fictionThis assertion is one which must be made again, and over again, untilthe general reader and the "serious" critic cease to associate sciencefiction solely with girls in brass brassieres being rescued from theadvances of bug-eyed monsters by zap-gun-toting heroes in space armor. Thereis as much of a spectrum of excellence in science fiction as there is in anyother field. Mickey Spillane is not Dorothy Sayers or Ngaio Marsh. HopalongCassidy is not Shane or True Grit. And the best of science fiction is quiteas good as the best of any literature.It happens also to be the most explosively popular genre on the currentscene. American and English science fiction is widely read in France, Italy,and Scandinavia, increasingly in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America, and isattaining new peaks in Germany and the Netherlands. New writers areappearing in Europe, especially in France and Italy, and the translationsare beginning to Bow the other way into the English-speaking world. And therise in printed science fiction is reflected in the increasing number ofcinema and television productions in the fieldThere are several reasons--and a great many more hypotheses-- for thisupsurge, but they are not within the purview of these remarks and can beleft to the dozens of postgraduate theses being written on the subject andto the teachers of high-school and college courses in science fiction (ofwhich there are, at this writing, over 1,500 in the U.S.A. alone). Sufficeit to say that there has never been a field of literature so limitless, soflexible, so able to evoke astonishment and wonder, so free of theboundaries of time and space and that arbitrary fantasy we call reality, asscience fiction. Not since the invention of poetry.What is not generally known to the readers of science fiction inEnglish is that the most widely read science-fiction writer in the world isnot Heinlein or Bradbury or Clarke, but Stanislaw Lem, a Pole; that thelargest science-fiction section of a writers' union is in Hungary; thatexcellent science fiction is being produced in East Germany, Czechoslovakia,and especially in the Soviet Union. Some Of this--far too little--isbeginning to trickle into the English-speak- ing world, and, sad to say, acertain portion suffers from execrable translation. Some works have had thehazards of translation more than doubled by passing from the original to asecond language before being rendered from that into English, a process inwhich the style and character of even a laundry list could hardly beexpected to survive. Keeping that in mind, however, the discerning readerwill find, even in the most brutalized of translations, a strength andinventiveness marvelous to behold.In the highest echelon of Soviet science-fiction writers stand thenames of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. I first encountered these talentedbrothers in a novel called Hard to Be a Cod Remarkable, purely as a novel,for structure, characterization, pacing, and its perceptive statements ofthe human condition, it touches also on almost every single quality mostavidly sought by the science-fiction reader. It has space flight and futuredevices; it has that wondrous "what if ... ?" aspect in its investigationinto sociology; by its richly detailed portraiture of an alien culture itaffords a new perspective on the nature of ours and ourselves; it even hasthat exciting hand-to- hand conflict so dear to the hearts of that cousin ofscience fiction called swords-and-sorcery. And among its highest virtues isthis: though there are battles and fights and blood and death where thenarrative calls for them, the super-potent protagonist never kills any-body. Writers everywhere, keeping in mind in these violent times theirresponsibility for their influence, should take note. It can be done, anddone well, at no expense to tension and suspense.And now comes Roadside Picnic. . . . In the so-called Golden Age ofAmerican science fiction, when the late John W. Campbell, editorextraordinary, gathered around him in a handful of months the great- eststable of science fiction talent ever seen, he would throw out challenges tohis writers, like: "Write me a story about a man who will die in twenty-fourhours 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 storyabout a creature that thinks as well as a man but not like a man." (Theanswer "Woman" is disallowed as too obvious a rejoinder.)The Strugatskys posit that the Earth experiences a brief visit fromextraterrestrials, who leave behind them--well, call it litter, such asmight 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 anutterly alien technology, defies most earthly logic, to say nothing ofearthly analytical science, and their potential is limitless. Warp thesepotentials into all-too-human goals--the quest for pure knowledge for itsown sake, the search for new devices, new techniques, to achieve new heightsin human well-being; the striving for profit, with its associatedcompetitiveness; and the ravening thirst for new and more terribleweapons--and you have the framework of this amazing short novel. Add theStrugatskys' deft and supple handling of loyalty and greed, of friendshipand love, of despair and frustration and loneliness, and you have a trulysuperb 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 itmight have been written by quite different authors--which is the highestpossible tribute to the authors' versatility. How much you like it willdepend on your taste for satire and lampoon. It is, in nature, reminiscentof Lem's Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, with (and here I confess to a highlysubjective evaluation) one important difference: Lem's approach and styleare, in comparison, unleavened, no matter how deeply he plunges into thesurrealistic and the absurd. The cumulative effect is Kafkaesque horror. TheStrugatsky fury--and it is fury: disgust with hypocrisy, with bureaucraticbumbling, with self-serving, self-saving distortions of logic and of truthand of initially decent human motivations--their fury is laced withlaughter, rich with scorn, effervescent with the comic spirit. One has tosearch back to Alice's tea party to find a scene as mad as the chamber ofthe Troika; yet, in retrospect, one realizes that one has experienced aprofoundly 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, thetranslator of these short novels. Russian I do not know; fiction I do; and Imust honor anyone who can so deftly pass emotion, character dimension, evenconversational idiom, through so formidable a barrier. Theodore Sturgeon SanDiego, California 1976Arkady and Boris Strugatsky Translated from Russian by Antonina W.Bouis MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc, New YorkRoadside PicnicYou have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you havegot to make it out of. * Robert Penn WarrenFROM AN INTERVIEW BY A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT FROM HARMONT RADIO WITHDOCTOR VALENTINE PILMAN, RECIPIENT OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS FOR 19.."I suppose that your first serious discovery, Dr. Pilman, should beconsidered what is now called the Pilman Radiant?""I don't think so. The Pilman Radiant wasn't the first, nor was itserious, 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 toevery schoolchild.""That doesn't surprise me. According to some sources, the PilmanRadiant was discovered by a schoolboy. Unfortunately, I don't re member hisname. Look it up in Stetson's History of the Visitation --it's described infull detail there. His version is that the radiant was discovered by aschoolboy, that a college student published the coordinates, but that forsome unknown reason it was named after me.""Yes, many amazing things can happen with a discovery. Would you mindexplaining it to our listeners, Dr. Pilman?""The Pilman Radiant is simplicity itself. Imagine that you spin a hugeglobe and you start firing bullets into it. The bullet holes would lie onthe surface in a smooth curve. The whole point of what you call my firstserious discovery lies in the simple fact that all six Visitation Zones aresituated on the surface of our planet as though someone had taken six shotsat Earth from a pistol located somewhere along the Earth-Deneb line. Denebis the alpha star in Cygnus. The Point in the heavens from which, so tospeak, the shots came is the Pilman Radiant.""Thank you, doctor. My fellow Harmonites! Finally we have heard a clear... [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]