#olena bormashenko

[biblioklept]

Mass-market Monday | Arkadi & Boris Strugatski's Hard to Be a God

Hard to Be a God, Arkadi & Boris Strugatski. Translation by Wendayne Ackerman. Daw Books, first edition, first printing (1973). Cover art by Kelly Freas. 205 pages. Like many anglophones, I first sought out the Brothers Strugatsky–which I will continue to spell with a final –y here, in line with the spelling variation I’ve used on this blog for years now, while also above conceding this 1973…

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[wishmachines]

The question of whether human beings are or will be able to understand any and all information we receive from the universe is one that most science fiction, riding on the heady tide of scientism, used to answer with an unquestioning Yes. The Polish novelist Stanisław Lem called it “the myth of our cognitive universalism.” Solaris is the best known of his books on this theme, in which the human characters are defeated, humbled by their failure to comprehend alien messages or artifacts. They have failed the test.

Ursula K. Le Guin, in her introduction to Olena Bormashenko’s translation of Roadside Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky

[getoutofmyhouse]

I like eccentrics in general.

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic, tr. Olena Bormashenko

[wishmachines]

“Listen to what I’m telling you. It’s very strange.” He picked up his glass, drank off half in one gulp, and continued, “We don’t know what happened to the poor people of Harmont at the very moment of the Visit. But now one of them has decided to emigrate. Some ordinary resident. A barber. The son of a barber and the grandson of a barber. He moves to, say, Detroit. Opens a barbershop, and all hell breaks loose. More than ninety percent of his clients die in the course of a year; they die in car accidents, fall out of windows, are cut down by gangsters and hooligans, drown in shallow places, and so on and so forth. Furthermore. The number of municipal disasters in Detroit increases sharply. The number of gas pump explosions jumps by a factor of two. The number of fires caused by faulty wiring jumps by a factor of three and a half. The number of car accidents jumps by a factor of three. The number of deaths from flu epidemics jumps by a factor of two. Furthermore. “The number of natural disasters in Detroit and its environs also increases. Tornadoes and typhoons, the likes of which haven’t been seen in the area since the 1700s, make an appearance. The heavens open, and Lake Ontario or Michigan, or wherever Detroit is, bursts its banks. Well, and more to that effect. And the same cataclysms happen in any town, any region, where an emigrant from the neighborhood of a Zone settles down, and the number of cataclysms is directly proportional to the number of emigrants that settle in that particular place.  And note that this effect is only observed with emigrants who lived through the Visit. Those who were born after the Visit have no impact on the accident statistics. You’ve lived in Harmont for ten years, but you moved here after the Visit, and you could safely move to the Vatican itself. How do we explain this? What do we have to give up—statistics? Or common sense?”

— Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic (translated by Olena Bormashenko)

[wishmachines]

Suddenly, he seemed to be in another world. A million smells assaulted him at once—smells that were sharp, sweet, metallic; dangerous, caressing, disturbing; as immense as houses, as tiny as dust particles, as rough as cobblestones, and as delicate and intricate as watch gears. The air turned hard, it appeared to have surfaces, corners, edges, as if space had been filled with huge coarse spheres, polished pyramids, and gigantic prickly crystals, and he was forced to make his way through all this, as if in a dream, pushing through a dark antique shop full of ancient misshapen furniture . . . This only lasted a moment. He opened his eyes, and everything disappeared. This wasn’t another world—it was his same old world turning an unfamiliar side toward him, revealing it for an instant, then immediately sealing it off, before he even had the chance to investigate.

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic (translated by Olena Bormashenko)

[wishmachines]

Xenology is an unnatural mixture of science fiction and formal logic. At its core is a flawed assumption—that an alien race would be psychologically human.

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic (translated by Olena Bormashenko)

[wishmachines]

Now in those three neighborhoods over there, people went blind. That’s what people call them nowadays: the First Blind Quarter, the Second Blind Quarter . . . They didn’t go completely blind but rather got something resembling night blindness. Strangely, they say they weren’t blinded by a flash of light, though it’s said there were some bright flashes, but by an awful noise. It thundered so loudly, they say, that they instantly went blind. Doctors tell them: That’s impossible, you can’t be remembering right! No, they insist, there was loud thunder, from which they went blind. And by the way, no one else heard any thunder at all...

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic (translated by Olena Bormashenko)

[wishmachines]

I.

“What do you think about the Visit?”

“Certainly,” said Valentine. “Imagine a picnic. Imagine: a forest, a country road, a meadow. A car pulls off the road into the meadow and unloads young men, bottles, picnic baskets, girls, transistor radios, cameras … A fire is lit, tents are pitched, music is played. And in the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that were watching the whole night in horror crawl out of their shelters. And what do they see? An oil spill, a gasoline puddle, old spark plugs and oil filters strewn about … Scattered rags, burntout bulbs, someone has dropped a monkey wrench. The wheels have tracked mud from some godforsaken swamp … and, of course, there are the remains of the campfire, apple cores, candy wrappers, tins, bottles, someone’s handkerchief, someone’s penknife, old ragged newspapers, coins, wilted flowers from another meadow …”

“I get it,” said Noonan. “A roadside picnic.”

“Exactly. A picnic by the side of some space road. And you ask me whether they’ll come back…”

— Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic (translated by Olena Bormashenko)

II.

I’ve never really been convinced by those theories regarding visits from other worlds. It doesn’t seem logical. Who would want to come here? What for? I don’t think anyone has ever been interested in traveling to our world and, if some came, it’s easy enough to imagine that they were something akin to mischievous kids. Like boys dressed in black leather jackets riding motorcycles too big for their bodies, popping wheelies (all those reports of commercial airline pilots with too many of those little bottles in the fuel tank), terrorizing and taking advantage of the residents of a small town (all those absurd stories of astral coitus), and ending up crashing on the first tricky curve (oh, the Roswell blues), or more or less clever boys who came down here, to the edge of the galaxy, and built a sand pyramid or two and then went home to their parents when the suns of their planet set. And that’s it. Nothing more.

— Rodrigo Fresán, The Bottom of the Sky (translated by Will Vanderhyden)