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 genre slips easily into elitism—superbrilliant minds” (iii).

In the character of Valentine, however, the authors do provide the “superbrilliant” mind to which many science-fiction readers have become accustomed. Rather than make him the hero of the story, the authors make Valentine into a man who is sadly aware of his own powerlessness over the outcome of the Visit, resigned to sit back and watch while less intelligent, more venal individuals play with fire by messing with alien artifacts they could never hope to understand.

When Richard asks Valentine what he thinks of the Visit, Valentine explains why human scientists have struggled to determine a purpose behind most of what is recovered in the Zone and have failed to figure out how any of it works. Valentine addresses the undeniable impact of alien spacells on humanity, saying that when humans plug their spacells into their cars to start them, they are exhibiting no greater intelligence than a monkey pressing a button for a piece of fruit.

This raises the question of whether scientists’ failure to understand the aliens’ technology is simply a matter of intelligence—if only humans were smarter, one might say. Valentine throws cold water on this assumption as well, calling into question the entire idea of intelligence in saying,

‘Believe it or not, we don’t [know what intelligence is]. We usually proceed from a trivial definition: intelligence is the attribute of man that separates his activity from that of the animals. It’s a kind of attempt to distinguish the master from his dog, who seems to understand everything but can’t speak. However, this trivial definition does lead to wittier ones. They are based on depressing observations of the aforementioned human activity. For example: intelligence is the ability of a living creature to perform pointless or unnatural acts’ (130).

Valentine’s—and by extension the authors’—skepticism of human intelligence and reason contributes to a broader tone of pessimism around the power of science to unlock the secrets of the universe.