Difference between revisions of "TLPS"
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| − | === Roadside Picnic === | + | === Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic === |
In 1971, the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky wrote a short science fiction novel known as “Roadside Picnic’. It was later used as the basis for the screenplay of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, although the movie bears little resemblance to the quirkiness of the novel itself, as the first cut of the film had allegedly been shot on poor stock, and financial pressures caused the film to be edited to become a cheaper, simpler allegorical version of the original Roadside Picnic. | In 1971, the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky wrote a short science fiction novel known as “Roadside Picnic’. It was later used as the basis for the screenplay of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, although the movie bears little resemblance to the quirkiness of the novel itself, as the first cut of the film had allegedly been shot on poor stock, and financial pressures caused the film to be edited to become a cheaper, simpler allegorical version of the original Roadside Picnic. | ||
Revision as of 20:01, 27 December 2014
Thoughts / Inspiration / References
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic
In 1971, the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky wrote a short science fiction novel known as “Roadside Picnic’. It was later used as the basis for the screenplay of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, although the movie bears little resemblance to the quirkiness of the novel itself, as the first cut of the film had allegedly been shot on poor stock, and financial pressures caused the film to be edited to become a cheaper, simpler allegorical version of the original Roadside Picnic.
Most alien visitation stories imagine that humans are worth the alien’s time in making contact with, or even worth expending resources on to blow us up. We assume that it we can understand aliens on our terms. But what if, similar to Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, the aliens visiting us are so far removed that no meaningful communication is possible? What if they just came and went without so much as noticing us? Like humans stopping by the road to have a picnic, leaving their random, meaningless detritus along the way for the animals to find but never understand?
"A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around… Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind... And of course, the usual mess—apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow…"
"A highly rational culture threw containers with artifacts of its civilization onto Earth."
In short, the objects in this group have absolutely no applications to human life today. Even though from a purely scientific point of view they are of fundamental importance. They are answers that have fallen from heaven to questions that we still can’t pose.
The items left behind were just pieces of garbage, discarded and forgotten by their original user, without any preconceived notions of wanting to advance or damage humanity. Users, inscrutable, whose motivations we cannot understand. The humans pick over the god-like alien’s refuse, some of which the humans use to revolutionise human technology, some of which have unexpectedly destructive effects on the humans. At the end, it leaves the humans rushing to make up theories to explain for the visitation.
Utsuro-bune
The Utsuro-bune (うつろ舟) or "hollow ship" is an unknown object which was said to have washed ashore on the eastern coast of Japan in 1803, and which is mentioned in 3 texts - Toen shōsetsu (1825), Hyōryū kishū (1835) and Ume-no-chiri (1844). The hollow ship drifted ashore and was found to have carried a beautiful young lady in rich clothes with red hair and very fair skin. Some description of the ship was given that it even had windows made of glass which were completely transparent, although ethnographers have noted that it was not uncommon for boats to be round at the time, and that it might have been described as such in order to make the story more believable.
