Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic ****

I've been scouring used book stores for years for a copy of Roadside Picnic, and I finally found a (new!) SF Masterworks edition at Half Price Books. Roadside Picnic is the source material for one of my favorite films, Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker.

Not surprisingly, Roadside Picnic is the source for Stalker in the same sense that Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is the source for Blade Runner. The films take place in the same universe as the books and cherry-pick certain details, but they tell fundamentally different stories. Stalker is about human desire and faith; Roadside Picnic is about our lack of understanding and agency.

Thirteen years before, aliens visited a half-dozen sites on Earth. No living humans saw them, but they left behind a variety of artifacts and strange phenomena: inseparable disks that float 18 inches apart ("empties"), perpetual motion bracelets, sticks that reflect light on a delay, areas of intensified gravity ("bug traps"), drifting clouds of intense heat. The Visit sites are sealed off, but there's a robust black market in alien artifacts lead by stalkers, who sneak into the Zone to bring them out. In fact, there's an entire social system based around this trade.

The action is well presented, but the most interesting thing about Roadside Picnic is that it deals with the aftermath of alien contact rather than the contact itself, and with the effect on everyday folks rather than experts. We learn how the alien artifacts work but have no idea what they actually are, and we live our lives based on social forces instead of personal desires.

Steve Erickson, Shadowbahn **

I used to be a huge fan of Steve Erickson. As time goes on, however, his books have less of the vivid dreamlike imagery that I like and more of the overblown pretentiousness that I don't.

Shadowbahn starts with a very Erickson-like image: the World Trade Center towers reappear in the Badlands of South Dakota, and everyone hears music coming from the empty buildings... but different songs for different people. Most of the story, however, is an alternate version of the past in which Jesse Garon Presley survives rather than his twin Elvis Aron Presley, causing significant changes in cultural history. The bulk of the text is Greil Marcus-like rumination on songs and how they reflect America.

He heads toward a west that is the dreamer's true north, where the desert comes looking for us and curls at the door, a wild animal made of our ashes; hijacking the sun halfway, Jesse leaves his shadow at the crossroads.

Ooof. Has Erickson's writing changed or has my taste? I'll have to go back to his earlier books at some point. 

Chuck Klosterman, But What If We're Wrong? ***

I am deeply interested in the question that Klosterman discusses in this book: What if some of our "deeply engrained cultural and scientific beliefs" turn out to be false? For example, in the introduction he quotes the physicist Brian Greene:

There is a very, very good chance that our understanding of gravity will not be the same in five hundred years.

Unfortunately (from my perspective), Klosterman spends more time pondering our cultural future than our scientific one. What authors and musicians will people remember five hundred years from now, and based on what critical principles? It's an interesting thought experiment, but the fact that our aesthetic judgments change over time is not surprising. The fact that future humans might declare a currently obscure artist to be the most important of our era is not as mind-blowing as the idea that we might completely misunderstand the laws of physics.

In fact, Klosterman largely denies the possibility that our current scientific beliefs could be fundamentally wrong. The scientific method, mathematization, and the pure utility of our knowledge argue against it. But I think this answer misses the point. I don't doubt that the equations governing gravity or quantum mechanics are fundamentally right, but I do doubt that our conceptual understanding of the underlying system is correct. I'm sure that's what Brian Greene means in the quote above.

My favorite chapter turns out to be about the future of American football. It shows subtle insight into the operation of culture.

Patrick O'Brian, The Truelove ** 1/2

A placeholder episode in the Aubrey-Maturin saga. The entire book concerns an uneventful cruise in which the Surprise suffers from internecine tension due to the presence of a woman on board. (The original English title, Clarissa Oakes, is far more suitable.) The strain creates a hitch in the usual smooth cooperation of the crew, and a concomitant hitch in the usual smooth flow of O'Brian's prose. They - both the crew and the prose - still get the job done, but it's not as pleasant as it should be.

Stephen knew that he had said all this before, off the many, many islands and remote uninhabited shores they had passed, irretrievably passed; he knew that he might be being a bore; yet the tolerant smile on Martin's face, though very slight indeed, vexed him extremely.  

Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs *** 1/2

Despite its explosive title and the dramatic adjectives on its cover ("unpredictable," "breathtaking," "devastating"), The Association of Small Bombs impressed me most with its portrayal of everyday middle-class Indian life. Mahajan doesn't go out of his way to describe the characters and locations where his story plays out, but they felt very real.

The plot kicks off with a terrorist bombing in a small Delhi market. Two young brothers are among the dead, and their Muslim friend survives with injuries. The story follows the boy's parents, their surviving friend Mansoor, and the terrorists who planted the bomb. The bomb changes them all.

On this particular day, [the boys] had gone with a friend in an auto-rickshaw to pick up the Khurana's old Onida color TV, consigned to the electrician for perhaps the tenth time. But when Mr. Khurana was asked by friends what the children were doing there...he said, "They'd gone to pick up my watch from the watch man." ... Why lie, why now? Well, because to admit to their high-flying friends that their children had not only died among the poor, but had been sent out on an errand that smacked of poverty... would have, in those tragic weeks following the bombing, undone the tightly laced nerves that held them together.

I found the mundane details more compelling than the major events, and was similarly impressed by the way that ordinary trains of thought led some characters to terrorism. (This aspect reminded me of Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist.)