Roadside Picnic

As early as the book’s introduction, Roadside Picnic differentiates itself from other novels and films about alien visitations in two major ways. The first is that the aliens don’t attempt to contact humans. While most can’t grasp this indifference, Valentine possesses no preconceptions or biases about an intelligent race. Unlike other scientists and philosophers who buckle under the strain of not knowing, Valentine relishes the Visit itself. In the book’s introduction, Valentine tells a Harmont radio correspondent, “The fact of the Visit is not only the most important discovery of the last thirteen years, it’s the most important discovery in human history” (3). For Valentine, plot, point, or purpose all play second-fiddle to the previously-improbable fact that aliens visited humans.

The second way Roadside Picnic diverges from other science fiction novels is that it refuses to elevate brilliant scientists to a position of heroism. Moreover, it doesn’t fetishize science itself as something that on a long enough timeline will never fail to answer the big questions about the universe. In the book’s Foreword, Ursula Le Guin writes: “[The] use of ordinary people as the principal characters was fairly rare in science fiction when the book came out, and even more the