![]() ![]() Aren’t humans absurd? I suppose we like praise for its own sake. Fame? How famous could we get? He became famous: now he’s known to three. It’s funny, I wonder why we like being praised. Especially by General Lemchen, in spite of himself. There is a deep seated malaise within both Richard Nooman, an engineer and supplier to the local scientific institute, and his colleague Valentine Pillman, about man’s status in regards to his existence now the Zone is present. Yet this entails that man is thus no better then what he sets himself apart from i.e. Anything good that can be said of man, is that he can be said to have the ability to continue to survive. This leads to a denial of man’s supposed greatness. There are also epistemological and existential failures, an intellectual pessimism one could say, caused by the Zone. There is a failure – not just on sociological, cultural and economic levels – whereby government and societal institutions fail to prevent Stalkers bringing artefacts out of the Zone to sell onto the black market, as well as the various adverse effects had on the citizens of Harmont due to the Visit. The Hegelian notion of the progression of self-consciousness, similar to their other novel Hard to Be a God (1964), and a focus on humanist ideals are called into question throughout the work. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic (1971) can be seen as a critique of perceived humanist and enlightenment tendencies within scientific culture. ![]()
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